Chameleon, being a book of my selves

V

C hamcleon

H|Being the BooK of My Selves

am in

sseres

Ll EBEf\& LEWIS NEW-YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY LIEBER & LEWIS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO BIO

These essays have appeared (1903-1915)
in the New York Sun, the Philistine, Mind,
Reedy's Mirror, the Critic, Liberty, Moods
and Wiltshire's Magazine. Thanks are here
by extended for permission to reprint them.

CONTENTS

The Brain and the World .... 7

The Mirth of the Brain 13

Wonder 20

The Almightiness of Might .... 31

The Intangible Life 39

The Irony of Negatives 51

History 63

The Passion of Distance 75

The Comic View 82

The Artist 89

Under a Mask 99

A Memorable Escape 106

The Masquerade 117

Respectability 124

The Impenitent 131

The Eternal Renaissance 146

Silence 154

Posterity: The New Superstition . . 163

An Evaporating Universe .... 170

The Trail of the Worm 180

Cosmic Marionettes 188

The Drama of Days 194

Absorption: A Universal Law . . .199

Acatalepsy '. . 208

Coda 215

THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD

WE never come into contact with
things, but only with their images.
We never know the real — only
effigies of the real. We do not pursue
objects; we pursue the reflection of objects.
We do not possess things; we possess the
emotions that things inspire.

If I pluck a flower and hold it in my
hand I have merely come into contact with
an image in my brain created by certain
complex influences transmitted through the
senses from an unknowable. No one pur
sues power or wealth; he pursues ideas and
images of power and wealth. Strictly
speaking, I do not live in a house, in the
air, but live in my house-image, my air-
image. Images and thoughts being the
very pulp of consciousness, it follows that
in images and thoughts there lies the only
reality we can ever know. Imagination
and its elements are not the effigies of
matter, but what we term matter is the
(7)

8 THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD

effigy of our images. Hence the imaginary
world — the world of intellect and images —
is the only real world. It is the unanalyz-
able data of consciousness.

We never get over the threshold of our
images. We live in images whether in rest
or motion. Illusion does not consist in be
lieving our images and dreams to be real,
but in believing that there exists anything
else but images and dreams. The illusions
of the brain are the only realities; they
become delusions when we try to ex
ternalize them. All practical men are
insane because they seek to externalize the
internal. All poets and philosophers are
sane because they seek to internalize the
external.

Idolatry is the worship of the non
existent. All practical life is founded on
the belief that there is something to be
had outside of the self, that there is a
pleasure to be had in things per se, that
Mecca is a place, not a belief. Matter is
something fashioned by the brain, an eidolon
of the will, the symbol of an image. The
practical person tries to grasp the symbol;
the poet tries to grasp the image. The
former must always fail because we never

THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 9

come into contact with matter, which is
the symbol of ideas; no mind ever comes
into contact with the external world. The
latter (the poet) always succeeds because
he arrays himself in himself; lives imme
diately in the thought, image or emotion
that a thing creates; he knows that the
materialization of an image is the substi
tution of a symbol for a reality.

The sense of universal disillusion, of the
almost total absence of relation between
dream and deed, is the ever-recurring proof
of the egocentricity of man. He is the
sun around which swing and dance the
worlds tossed off through immeasurable
time; worlds so seeming real, but which are
mere spawn of dreams, man's chance-litter.
To stretch out the hand from the House
of Images seeking to grasp this domed and
pinnacled mirage is the signal that wakes
the imps of irony from their subterranean
vaults and sends them swarming and gib
bering over the roofs and through the
streets of that image-chrismed city, now
suddenly become a deserted city of rotted
rookeries.

The eternal legend of the Brain and the
World, of the Image and the Mirage is

10 THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD

found in all ages — in the fables of Tantalus
and Ixion, in the world-wisdom of Don
Quixote and Faust, in "El Magico Pro-
digioso" of Calderon, in the Dhamapada,
in the Ibsen plays. The legerdemain of
the senses it is that scratches those lines of
sorrow at mouth-ends, draws heavy blank
curtains over the wild scenery of the eye,
sets a flag of truce on the purposeful brow
and sends us to cower behind the breast
works of an eternal reticence.

Men sail the seas for adventure, travel
towards the poles for the novel and seek in
remote lands the tang of the strange, the
witchery of the weird; but the adventure,
the novelty, the tang and the witchery are
in men themselves. I am my own novelty,
my own adventure; it is I who give tang
to life. I am bewitched of wonder and mys
tery — than me there is nothing more weird
that is conceivable. He who goes a-seeking
leaves himself behind. Other than your
soul there is no reality. We can go toward
nothing unless that thing has first come
toward us. The brain is not only the center
of gravity, but is gravity. The Will is not
only the inventor of the universe, but is
the universe.

THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 11

We go toward ourselves. My images
and dreams and thoughts are eggs. I
enwomb and unwomb myself. I have in
finities, eternities, nadirs, zeniths boxed in
my brain. I am always delivering myself
to myself, cannot forsake myself, cannot
possibly exist in the world — seeing that the
world exists in me.

The world began with mind; before that
it was only a possibility. The brain is the
radiant hub of the universal illusion. We
have exiled the stars in their spaces and
imprisoned light in its wall-less tombs of
air. Pole star and the frozen mountains
of the moon are the mere flotsam and jetsam
of our evolved and highly elaborated imag
ining. All — all is only the balustrade of
the mind, out on the furthest portals of
which this mysteriously appeared I peers
for all its days at the image-children that
it has flung off in its incalculable evolutions.

This ethereal upstart with the brazen
acclaim, this image-haunted mystery that
we name Man, who, after all, is but a
slight excess of Nothing and yet the meas
ure of all, a drop of blazing oil that has
bubbled out of a beaker of flame in the
hands of a Something — what does he know?

12 THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD

There are the image and the imagined,
the Brain and the World, the Eternal
Ghost fabricating its world-shrouds.

THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN

WHY is there laughter in an
existence that none of us laughs
at? Why is there mirth in
a world of struggle and precarious
chances? We come into life with a scream
of agony and go out of it with palms ex
tended, signifying nothing. Proserpina is
the goddess of death, and no one has been
found stronger than she — except it be
Momus, the god of laughter, whom Proser
pina cannot slay.

Laughter is no accident. It is something
rooted in the depths of our being. Pain
is deeper than all thought; laughter is
higher than all pain. Care cudgels us with
an ebon stave — but look above! there is
Laughter — the fairy goddess waving a sil
ver-bright wand.

There is a comic spirit in things as well

as a tragic spirit. The gods bowl us over

and still we make merry. Hurricane,

earthquake, war and fire conspire to an-

(13)

14 THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN

nihilate us, but jocosity and joviality flow
in an unbroken stream from the springs of
buoyancy set deep within the soul of man.

Only the heart suffers. The brain is
the peaceful, undisturbed, eternal spectator
of the monstrous paradox called Life. The
mind never worries, is never perturbed, is
never in pain. The heart — that great lu-
panar of desires — may seduce the brain
to participate in its earth-itches; but in it
self the mind is a detached, impersonal ob
server of the great tangled web of passion
and error that is spun in the heart of man.

Mind as mind has the placidity of a mir
ror. All things are reflected in it, but for
the image of Lady Macbeth it cares no
more than for the image of Falstaif.

The unconscious universe struggled and
fought until it evolved a brain. In mind
the star and plant rise to thought. The
World- Spirit contemplates itself through
the brain of man. It is the light born of
darkness. Through the brain nature passes
from actor to observer, from blind, eyeless
combat to wide-eyed intelligence, from an
immemorial pain to the beginnings of an
immemorial mirth.

Impersonal contemplation — that is the

THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 15

secret of laughter. Mirth is as old as the
first mind that detached itself — even for a
single hour — from the service of the emo
tions and the lower nature generally. The
first man who said, "I will retire from the
combat a little while to the hill to watch
the fray" was the first man who laughed
with his brain. Distance, aloofness, height
strike out by a magic psychic friction the
spark that bears in its centre the germ of
philosophy. Only cosmic comedians be
come as the gods.

The elements of the incongruous and ri
diculous run through all the affairs of men.
The intervention of the unknown at each
moment in their affairs and schemes whirls
them off their feet and elicits from Intellect
the same gleeful scream that children give
vent to in a circus when the trapeze per
former whirls unexpectedly through the
air. With the significant difference that
the circus acrobat knows where he is going
to land, but the acrobat Man in this great
cosmic circus is caught unawares and lands
where Circumstance forgot to spread her
nets.

The World- Spirit is a freakish, ironic
spirit. It contrives strange outcomes to our

16 THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN

conscious plans. We plan and plan in one
spirit, and behold! another spirit takes
possession. Dante's Inferno, written in a
religious fervor as an exposition of theo
logical conception, set at work the forces
which finally overthrew those very concep
tions. The Inquisition, instituted to fasten
by force a religious creed on the world,
was the means that brought about the final
4- annihilation of the means. Anarchy spreads
just in the measure that you persecute it.
The means employed to enslave a people
are the very means that awaken the pas
sion for liberty in their souls. There
is no surer way to keep forces in motion
that you wish to annihilate than to persist
ently struggle against them. If you wish
to see how far a pendulum will swing to
the right, draw it to the extreme left.

This is the Immanent Mirth in things —
the quiet laughter of the hidden Prestidigi-
tateur; the exquisite mockery of nature
which made hilarious the days of Rabelais.
Leisure is the condition of the growth
of the smile in the brain. Laughter comes
with contemplation. A man may take joy
in his work, but he cannot laugh at it.
Mirth is a kind of serene scepticism. It

THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 17

comes only with intelligence. The percep
tion that life is something of a joke may
possibly come to a boor laboring in the
fields, but it clothes itself to him as a bitter
jest, for his brain is still the handmaiden
of his stomach. The leisure of Mephisto-
pheles, the intelligence of Lucifer — these
must be approached to perceive the depth
on depth of world- jollity.

Fanaticism, the man with the fixed idea —
the antithetical mental attitude to the world-
sceptic — is incapable of cerebral mirth. The
finest minds are those in which intelligence
and insight spread out like the gradual
opening of a circular fan. They come to
perceive all sides in one glance. They are
like a man who stands at the north pole —
all longitudes centre in him; he sees all
the imaginary lines that men map and num
ber and believe in. He is conscious for the
first time of the absurdity of direction; he
comes to know in a flash how purely arbi
trary are affirmative ideas about any
thing.

And he laughs a long laugh into the
skies.

The dominant note observable in Nature
— observable only to the eye of the mind

18 THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN

that has severed itself from the prejudices
of the will — is blitheness. She seems al
ways to be laughing; her most terrible mo
ments are like the scowls that elders put
on in front of naughty children who really
amuse them — the mocking mask of mirth.
Nature goes her way through her four
seasons with a carelessness, an insouciance,
a sangfroid such as men have who care
nothing for death or who have learned the
fine secret that the tomb covers but does
not hide. Life is a huge joke to the Im
mortal Mother. She laughs eternally
because she is wiser than her children. She
knows nothing is lost. She knows that
death is recomposition and pain is the way
character is tooled.

How deep was Shakespeare's mirth when
he gave us Puck! Puck, the lordly imp of
a topsy-turvy universe; Puck who is the
seer par excellence of the world; Puck who
put a girdle of laughter around the universe ;
Puck who smiled and smiled and was not
a villain — only a divine sportsman who
played battledore and shuttlecock with us
in the fields of Eternity.

There is quenchless grief in all things —
if we will have it so. Move up into the

THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 19

higher altitudes and the grief in all things
turns to a quenchless mirth.

The higher altitude is just that step from
the heart to the brain.

WONDER

TO see, one must close the eyes. This
is the paradox of insight — a seeing
into. The physical world is nothing
but insulated force. It is only the mind's
eye that can pierce the arras of images and
behold the unimaginable.

The mystic sense is a form of vascular
activity. It is the palpitant ethereal in us,
the radio-activity of the corpuscle. In the
sluiceways of the brain it rises to conscious
ness.

Our brains are portable universes, and
our souls are unbirthed worlds. God
created the material world, Bishop Berkeley
destroyed it, and Herbert Spencer re
created it. We are coequal with the creat
ive gods. Man weaves microcosm into
macrocosm, bastes the ideal to the real, hems
soul to body. He tracks the roving ideal
from its lair in the cell of the polyp to its
full growth in his own brain, and he pins
the Eternal to a Law. His dreams trans-
(20)

WONDER 21

figure the Known to the Unknowable.

We have no criterion for anything. We
live in a Mystery. The data of life are
pleasure and pain, and these may be myths ;
an illusion of the nerve cells.

Seas of sound, light and motion swirl in
our brains, and the "great processes" are
cell-eddy. Thought is cerebral sight. We
may trail Circumstance back to the Primal
Antagonism, and there it is lost. Conscious
ness is the flash produced by friction. Birth
is recomposition of old matter, and death
is dissolution and recomposition. Mind is
evolved from mud, and . mud is mind in
transition. Form is purely accidental, and
the accidental is the unexpected inexorable.
Time is the space between thoughts, and
thought is Time spluttering. Space is the
distance between two illusions, and illu
sions are what-might-have-been projected
on the blank screen of tomorrow. All
growth presupposes pain, and all pain en
genders growth. Society is the systemati-
zation of instincts, and instincts are strati
fied lusts. All knowledge is word- juggle.
To know all would be to know nothing.

The mystic waits and wonders.

And this Wonder is the back-stairs to

22 WONDER

the stars — it is the Northwest Passage to
the pinnacle of the cosmos. It is where
one beholds most, but where one knows
least. It is to feel all things — yet to stand
in universal relations. It is a vision of
things in their totality but not in their
wholeness.

Everything is grounded in mystery.
Everything is swimming, and the stable
does not exist. Life is a series of guesses,
and there is mystery in a match. The com
monplace is the habitual, and the habitual
is a mystery that has grown stale from
sense-insistence. Life undulates; there is
no such thing as a level; a straight line
is a myth, and all directions are indirec
tions. Up and down are movable points
on horizons that do not exist; focus is an
eye-trick, and motion is cell-palpitation.

AH things radiate from a common point,
and differences are the same looked at from
various angles. The sap that flows in the
tree, the blood that flows in the veins, the
fires that flame from the sun, the waters
that run to the stars, and the passion litanies
breathed by lovers are aspects of force.
Star-shine and eye-glance and water-gleam
are the same.

WONDER 23

The star sees itself through the medium
of the human eye, and the moon shines on
itself.

Law created the brain, and the brain is
a crucible of Law. So each thing is a
compendium of all things, and still the All
is not found.

All acts are multiplied in the doing. Our
breathing builds or destroys unknown uni
verses, and a gesture is a signal to eternity.
The cells are chalices of desire. Every act
is a breeder of beings. On what shore
breaks the last vibration caused by the
lowering of an eyelash? Does the lover
alone throb with ecstasy when his beloved's
eyes thicken with love-mists? And who
shall say that our most subtle smile does
not stir to life a thousand unseen existences
that have been quivering on the thresholds
of life?

No act ever succeeds or fail; it does both.
We influence the unknown at every turn.
We are unknown workers in an unknown
world. We weave tomorrow on the shuttle
of today and unravel the past each minute.
All things are trying to stand still and go
on at the same time. Men desire rest and
motion simultaneously. They desire to go

24 WONDER

on in order to be able to rest. Self-con
servation is the basic principle in both rest
and motion. It is an everlasting ebb and
flow. But the mind ravished by Wonder is
beyond ebb and flow.

"Things pass into their opposites by
accumulation of indefinable quantities,"
says Walter Pater. In that process is
buried the paradox of evolution and the
concept which breeds the mystic mind. Hate
is comic, for you shall in time become that
which you hate; and the thing you scorn —
behold! that thou art! "Tvat Twam Asi"
(for that thou art) repeats the Hindoo
sage when the West talks of Me, Thou, It.
"Tvat Twam Asi" repeat Schopenhauer and
Emerson. A fact is but the glazed surface
on an abysmal mystery. It is the symbolist
in art who knows this. And all symbolists
are mystics.

Evolution is a method, and method is
the mantle of law. The Law itself lies out
of time and space. It is the Spencerian
Eternal Energy; it is that which knows
neither "upward" nor "downward." Like
ether, it permeates all things; it floods the
atoms; it is world-shine — consciousness.

Our souls are a method — part of the

WONDER 25

mantle; and every act is redolent of the
past. Things rise to a summit and flow
down on the other side, and the baby in its
birth hour may have attained the pinnacle
of the inconceivable, for the birth of a babe
has more of accomplishment in it than the
maturity of a man.

Nothing is spurious ; all things are in their
place. Artificiality is the curd on the nat
ural. No man wills; he is willed — for he
is a growth, and his roots are in the primor
dial. The secret is in the seed, and the seed
is the secret. No man can say, "I am
evolved;" he is forever evolving. He is a
"God in the crib," and his acts are only
hints of his dreams.

Decay is growth seen from the other
side. Decay and growth flout permanence.
An eternal continuance dragging anchor;
a measured swirl of unmeasured waters;
light flowering to form; abstraction mask
ing as a concretion — what else do we know?

We came from the simian and tend to the
sublime; and as the simian for ages was big
with man, so is the sublime heavy with its
unborn gods. The worm treads fast upon
the heels of God. Change has woven
shrouds for myriads of Creators, for the

26 WONDER

universe subsists en passant. The opal tint
in the dawn was spun by the lilies of the
field, and the human form is chiselled star-
dust. Alchemy is as universal as gravita
tion.

The universe began in an equilibration
and will end in an equilibration. A sigh,
an unrest, a faint ripple caused by some
antagonistic principle — and the Law moved,
and suffering was born. The pageantry
of the Fates began. Vega in Lyra and the
ant on its hill were diswombed in travail.

But why? With that question Wonder
falls on us.

You cannot seize upon the past or the
future. The universe is an eternal minute
forever tottering to its doom — cosmic
splash; torrent-mist; dream follicles that
have burst on the brain walls. Our sub-
limest act is still the abracadabra of an
Unknown God — a God who hides behind
a leaf and scribbles his contrarieties; a God
who is flea and futurity; who is oxygen and
Arcturus. There are cabals held in the
acorn, and the gods are enthroned in diatom.
The radiating laws are hubbed on a pimple,
and "evolution" is but a spoke in the Wheel
of Fire.

WONDER 27

Genius has Wonder; it is its sixth sense.
The being that has envisaged the cosmos
in a glance exhales the ether of the un-
plumbed spaces his eyes have beheld. He
is a white flame fleshed for the nonce. And
his poems and pictures and philosophies
are fables of Wonder.

Without this sense of Wonder the sing
ing of the stars is calliope music; the uni
verse is doggerel.

With the mystic gleam the universe is
still doggerel — but scrawled by a Shakes
peare.

Science is bankrupt. The unlettered
mystic in the Indian forest three thousand
years ago knew what science is just now
beginning to tell us. They now announce
that atoms are, after all, but centres of
force. "There is no such thing as matter,"
said the Hindoo complacently ages ago.
Science has discovered a substance called
radium, which gives forth particles without
losing weight. Nothing can be lost, nothing
can be gained in an infinite universe, has
been the essence of mystical teaching from
Heraclitus to Emerson. Wonder's method
is divination.

To the mystic, life is a "conscious slum-

28 WONDER

ber." Goethe and Balzac were great som
nambulists who in a dream wrote hastily
and feverishly what they thought they saw,
then went back to bed again. Poe's soul
never awakened to a single reality. From
the ebon vaults of the Unconscious it stole
upon a world of toppling shadows, ashen
days and vaporous, opiate sallows. In
stead of universal law he felt the universal
awe, and his life was a meditation on
shadows.

Walt Whitman had but to name a thing
and straightway that thing became a mys
tery. This solid-seeming and substantial
world he made to reel and hung the mystic
glamour of his soul upon the ant. He saw
no greater mystery than the hair on the
back of his hand, and he said that "a glance
of the eye shall confound the science of all
time."

The plodding fact-grubber crawls upon
a rim like a fly on a vase, but the mystic
is the light within.

To those who walk the world with open
eyes yet see not — those bald realists who
believe that when you have named a star
you have explained it — ideas stand for
things. But to the mystic things stand for

WONDER 29

ideas. They translate particulars into gen
erals. Goethe drew the universe into his
soul, and his dying words were, "More
Light." He had translated all things into
thoughts and all thoughts into visions, and,
standing of all men of the century on the
pinnacle of the spirit, he still stood in the
dark. The light he had was just great
enough to show him the impenetrability of
the darkness beyond and around. But he
fared forth with Wonder in his soul.

The mystics in philosophy, literature and
art do not differ essentially in any age.
Environment cannot touch them. Knowl
edge comes — and goes; the mystic lingers.
He is above time and clime, and the
"modern investigators" are ancient crooners
that shall be. Heraclitus or Maeterlinck,
Lucretius or Tolstoi, Spinoza or Thomas
Hardy, Sir Thomas Browne or Amiel,
Buddha or Carlyle, Shelley or D'Annunzio
— their premise is everlastingly the same:
Shadows that emerge from a Void, scud
across the earth, some in fury, some in
pallid calm — and then the Void again. A
ring, a circle; an arc of consciousness, an
arc of sleep ; an emergence and a disappear
ance — like that illusion of stagecraft where-

30 WONDER

in fifty men, by marching in a circle before
and behind the scenery, simulate an in
finite host — that is life.

These solemn-suited Brethren of Wonder
dwell in the husk of things, but are not of
the husk. They are wizard souls glaring
through the lattice of dreams, praying
sceptics immured in the Tomb with the
Black Panels. Their type of face is the
face of Percy Bysshe Shelley — the Angel
Israfel in flesh.

THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT

THE refinements of civilization are
more dangerous than the frank
brutalities of savagery; it is a sub
stitution of the serpent for the prowling
man-eater; the substitution of an insidious
corruption for a ceaseless battle in the day
light. In a state of nature the weakest go
to the wall; in a state of over-refined civil
ization both the weak and the strong even
tually go to the wall.

Civilization is the last refinement of the
herding instinct. All weakness is centri
petal. Strength is centrifugal. The "so
cial instinct" is a phase of fear.

As Nietzsche has pointed out, our "rights"
are our mights — that is, the thing we have
the power to do (if there go along with
it the power to immunize oneself from
penalty) we do; in fact, must do. Govern
ment imposes penalties on those who trans
gress its ordinances — that is, it opposes
power with power; escapes a pain by pre-
(31)

32 THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT

scribing one. The excuse made is that "the
welfare of the whole race" is at stake — that
is, organized society must forever make
war on minorities. And yet, if our view
take in a great space of time, we see these
minorities becoming majorities and the
majorities passing into minorities. When
the latter are ensconsed in power they,
forgetting their former "rights" as minor
ities, use exactly the same methods to per
petuate themselves as did their enemies,
now their prey.

The law of gravitation is the only dis
coverable moral law in the universe. Gravi
tation is involved in every "right." Without
gravitation the words good and evil could
not exist; we could have no attractions and
repulsions. The things to which I am at
tracted and which are attracted to me —
those things I have a "right" to; they are
my veiled destinies, my veritable selves. A
"right" springs from a need, and need is
the ethical equivalent of the physical law of
gravitation.

The obstacles that stand in the path of
my inexorable attractions must die — or else
slay me. It is merely a question of which
is the stronger, not whose is the trespass.

THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 33

Strength and Strength's will is the supreme
ethic. All else are dreams from hospital
beds, the sly goodness of weak souls.

It is the weak man who urges compro
mise — never the strong man. A weak man
is one who has not the courage of his gravi
tations; a strong man is the converse of
this. Power knows no evil but the threat
ened destruction of itself.

The essence of willing is self-destruction
— and aggression; self -exploitation cannot
be conceived of except as aggression. A
society prospers materially in so far as
each individual aggresses on the other. It
is called "Business." The problem is how
to subtilize it. "Immorality" is the essence
of "progress." There is, it is true, a com
mon sense that "holds a fretful realm in
awe." But it is no more "moral" than
gravitation or the centrifugal and centri
petal forces that preserve the orbit of the
planet. It is a mechanical law with social
implications.

This element of warfare is so deeply rooted
in the nature of things — it is so absolutely
a necessity if the universe is to continue
to exist — that Nature in order to perpet
uate herself everlastingly invents opposites

34 THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT

to attain her ends. Thus love. Affection
is one of the World-Spirit's devices for
more effectually carrying on her war of
part against part. It is a minor device in
the Great Method. Woman is the strong
man's recreation; or, in cosmic language,
after depletion, replenishment.

Supreme happiness engenders not only
the feeling of exalted well-being in our
selves but an overmastering desire to make
others suffer by either forcibly imposing
our happiness upon them or tantalizingly
parading it before their eyes. Or the su
premely happy may show the masked cru
elty of this state by patronizing those in
pain — by creating obligations, to be col
lected in the form of charity-kisses when
their own painful season comes on. To
prey — to prey — that is our essence. If we
cannot be powerful and happy and prey
on others we invent conscience and prey on
ourselves.

Have you divined the secret thoughts
of those who privily pride themselves on
their life of self-sacrifice? — how, finding
none to pat them on the back, they fabri
cate in their own souls a Greater than they
who tells them each night: "Well done, my

THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 35

servant." Ah! the compliments this mystic
being pays them I In spite of their smug,
dutiful countenances they, too, have their
bloated ego for companionship. They must
find a reward somewhere for their self-
slaughter. So intoxicated do they become
in their self-adulations, so hysterically
happy are these beings with their flagellant
rites that they seek to impose their beatifi
cation on others. So they invented Christ
and pass "Christian laws."

Humanity cannot escape its origins; it
admires force more than "goodness." It
will applaud power unallied to moral prin
ciples, but never moral principles unallied
to power. It loves the bold, though the
bold be "bad."

Only in the fury of excess does one catch
glimpses of the immortal truths. Ah! the
divine excess in great things — the excess
that shot Mont Blanc toward the stars, the
excess of life-force that sent Byron flaming
through Europe, the excess that flung Ver-
laine into the gutter! They who keep the
balances live long — and see nothing.

No two men's environments are the same
because no two men's mental states are the
same. Environment is a series of mental

36 THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT

states superposed on a hypothetical world.
Environment is not "the sum of the forces
which surround you," but the sum of the
illusions which fire your brain.

All suffering is caused by an obstacle in
the path of a force. See that you are not
your own obstacle.

All willing is not necessarily a willing
into fuller life, but it is invariably a willing
away from death. Man gives little thought
to his destination so long as he can remain
out of reach of his Pursuer.

The right to live has never been proved
except by the murderer and the thief.

There are countless reasons, no doubt,
why we should not be evil, but it is impos
sible to think of a single rational reason
why we should be "good." "Goodness" does
not necessarily bring health, wealth, wisdom
or peace of mind. Rather is it a smiling
martyrdom.

The joy of the savage who has slain his
enemies, the joy of the ascetic-saint who
has slain his instinctive nature are both
derived from the same source, the pleasure
of putting something to death.

If all Christians were like Christ there
would be no necessity for Christianity; for

THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 37

when once we have achieved absolutely and
in every particular our object, our passion,
our dream, the motives that urged us on to
that consummation disappear, and we are
left in exactly the same predicament from
which we wriggled. There is no Utopia
that would be worth living in for a single
month. Unless you are prepared for pain,
prepared to kill, skirt precipices and be
killed, you will always remain a decadent,
i. e., an idealist, a sick man.

The Christian "Kingdom of God," where
the weak, the stunted, the underfed and the
outcasts shall riot and roister and gorge
and swill and blaspheme at the strong
earth-man singing his deathless war-chant
in the hell-pits of strife!

There is no rising from lower to higher
in social systems — there is only a constant
redistribution of mediocrity, a thinning or
a thickening of the crust beneath which
glows the passion for liberty.

When society no longer exists for the wel
fare of the individual both must go, but the
individual will be the last to disappear be
cause he was the first to appear. Hence
to live for others to the exclusion of self
tends to the annihilation of both. But to

38 THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT

live for self to the exclusion of others does
not necessarily tend to the annihilation of
both the individual and society, for it is
easier to conceive of the existence of a single
individual without society than it is to con
ceive of society without a single individual.

Wherever "justice" has righted a wrong
it has wronged a right.

The social system is maintained by oppos
ing one vice to another ; it is a balance main
tained by bogus weights. The aggressive
instincts of the individual are held in check
by the threatened aggression of many in
dividuals.

THE INTANGIBLE LIFE

LIFE is a manifestation of uncon
scious ideas, a flowerlike exfolia
tion from an unseen, unknown
within to a visible, known without, of which
death is the rim.

The mind, the earlier mind, of man, half
opened, as a flower just before dawn, be
holding, fearing, this rim — this almost tan
gible cessation of the activities of the be
loved body — reacts upon itself in thought,
seeking blindly for something of the in
finite beyond matter; dreaming thus of
gaming for mental, spiritual intensity what
so soon must be lost in space and time;
asking, as it were, a concession from Fate
by a steady withdrawal from participation
in her more obvious empire, the external
world.

So is the dream born; and from the un
mapped territories in the atoms in the brain
there springs a being within a being — the
imaginative-prophetic soul, forerunner of
(39),

40 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE

the Intangible Life, the subverter and
sapper of the external world, a thing that
shall function in the limitless.

To beings so elected — few and unique
among those who live literally, the mud-
worms — the nearest thing is the remotest
thing. They are never quite socketted in
their environment, never quite come into
contact with their own bodies. Extension,
encounter and impact of bodily things are
not true for them. They stand with one
hand upon the door-bolt, about to go forth
from their enchanted souls into the grooves
of practical life; but they never make the
motion that is decisive. Merely they stand
there to listen apperceptively, or they peer
through the knot-hole of sense at the elabo
rate rituals of buffoonery.

Standing farther away from life, they
stand nearer to that which gives life; mov
ing not anywhere, they are everywhere.
They are never real in the sense that a
wall is real, being at most mere effigies of
flesh and blood leashed to a Vision.

They have for environment all that is
conceivable, all that is scooped into the nets
of imagination and intelligence from the
abysses of the unsounded inland sea — things

THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 41

strange, things chastened by ages of im
mobility and deep-sea lave, residue of lost
worlds, and things still alive reaching
through the tangled treasure of the soul
hands that grip, forcing through to the day
the short, agonized utterance of the baffled.
And, in rarer moments, they are environed
by the inconceivable — by those bare hints
that are the souls of the great unuttered
poems, and by those stranger epiphanies
that amaze, illuminate and destroy sense's
last belief in sense.

One may pick the world apart, pick it
to its last shred of matter; but it is pre
cisely here that life — the inexplicable, un-
analyzable, intangible roots of matter —
begins, and the scalpel must abdicate in
favor of the imagination, the winged intel
ligence.

Imagination is a spurt from the depths
of Being, a swirling geyser that gravitates
to a zenith set in the infinite.

Memory cannot take us beyond ourselves,
cannot carry us further than the experiences
of our special form of existence; it moves
in limits always. But in the mystic imagi
nation will be found the fragmentary
records of pasts long swallowed up, the

42 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE

shining dust of worlds crumbled beyond
possibility of reintegration, the whirling,
blazing meteoric stones flung from the
wrecks of incalculably remote selves.

Some golden minute overlooked in Time's
monstrous hour, a miraculous survival in
the impersonal memory of a wonder-time,
ungarnered of Oblivion: such magical
visitors come to the bedside of the ever-
dying body! For the Eternal Dreamer,
which is the soul of man, never dies, though
dreams themselves are made of perishables.

We dreamed as impulse and desire in
our parents and are lured into our bodies
by vague imaginings, urged from husk to
husk by the impetus of Karma, the spirits
of accumulated past acts. Whatever one
dreams tends to beget a body, and what we
are now is old dream come to be the phan
tasm of place, ancestral imagination turned
brain and sinew and blood.

The divinizing imagination can detach
itself from this present crucible wherein
it flows for a day and plunge into that age
less past, circumventing the shameful quick
ness of life, superposing on the sullen mys
tery of death the greater miracle of con
tinuity through perpetual effacement.

THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 43

Inundating me, I am back-rendered to
the things I was, fore-rendered to the things
I must be, resolving in a single eye-shot my
marvellous complexities into their simples;
beholding in this vile impulse the ravin of
some old fatality: recognizing in this im
medicable wound in the soul the work of
the Avenger who seeks out the unbalanced
and the impenitent — the old wolf with shin
ing tooth who prowls and whelps forever in
the souls of us !

Imagination is thus the menstruum of all
materials, and the poet in his contempla
tions gathers up this world in his brain as
one gathers waters in the hand. It was
Alexander who sat down and wept because
there were no more worlds to conquer. Had
he been a devotee of the Intangible Life
he would have wept because he could not
conquer all the worlds he saw.

Only the poet can track Time back to
its source, only the mystic is permitted to
step out of space or to lift the veil of the
uncircumstanced, where images fail, but
imagination still leads, where the guess is
the only certainty, where logic is nursery
block-building. He is the live king in the
catacombs of matter; the mummy that has

44 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE

split its wrappings and wings away. He
dislodges, disturbs, seeing in Law merely
the method of miracles.

Not where I am, but where I dream —
there am I.

When the sword is absent from the sheath
what matter where the sheath dangles?

My body may be beside you, but I may
not be there — nor anywhere where that
body could follow. All our troubles come
from standing too close to our skins. The
sword becomes bitten by the acids that cor
rode the scabbard. Sorrow is often only
an error of vision.

Imagination is a form of hunger. Ani
mals have little imagination because they
are easily satisfied — food and sexual gra
tification are all they require. The most
powerful imaginations are found in the un
happy. Poverty drives genius to the Intan
gible Life or brigandage. All great imag
inative art is a transcript of world-sorrow,
a record of things imperfect. All art is
a record of the Intangible Life, a confes
sion of the inadequacy of action. Nature
has, in the intellect of man, bred her foe.
She has in her blind willing willed her doom.
There is always a tendency in the intellec-

THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 45

tual mind to reject the things of sense, or
to use them merely to further the ends of
understanding. And the more the brain
understands the less the body lusts.

The intellect is religious: it demands a
rational universe. No end that is merely
a rebeginning can be a rational end.

The imagination — the eye of the intellect
— strains its orbs in search of another kind
of eternity than that in which we lie quite
helpless. And on her retina there is a tiny
shadow of the Reality.

Certain beings there are who seem to be
doing a work in some other sphere, to be
occupied elsewhere, to be mere shadowy
visitants of earth, looking on things about
them as clumsy forgeries of something
divinely writ — writ on other and finer
parchments than stone and earth and wave.
That feeling of walking in a "world unreal
ized" is no poetic myth, but the actual daily
experience of a type of mind not so rare
as most believe. It is direct contact with
Reality, the everlasting mood of the Un
changeable.

It is the secret of the Intangible Life,
this contact with the great scene-shifter;

46 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE

and perpetual melancholy is given for its
birthmark.

The agony of those on whom has fallen the
Infinite! of those doomed to sit up to their
eyes in the brack of this world and to feel
that above the eyes they are bathed by the
waters that flow nowhither from out the
nowhere. These centaurs of the mud and
of the azure cannot take the common part,
yet they cannot reject it wholly. Cakes
and ale and the hair-shirt they spurn; cakes
and ale and the hair-shirt are theirs still.
Their brooding, wistful faces peer across
the sills of the House of Revels and they
pass on, unallied, aliens beneath an alien
sun. To them the shoulders of Time seem
overweighted, forever and forever holding
up this accumulating burden of evil, this
daily increment of deed and dream, this per
petual transference of today's burdens to
the shoulders of endless reluctant tomor
rows.

The abstract mind, with its dower of
imaginative sight, swallows up all its im
pulses toward practical life. Why should
a man do anything when all that is done
changes in the doing? Our own motions
generate the cataracts that carry us to-

THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 47

ward life. The whole universe changes in
the moment of contemplation. There is
a dying and a resurrection of each thing
and all things each second. Into that bot
tomless sea of the Infinite there tumble all
stars, all peoples, all pleasant ways, all
bitter memories, all sub-human and super
human compounds, all the organized
shadows which we call things.

The being gnawed by this monstrous, in
visible super-concept is something of a god.
There is no rest for him night or day:
come spring, come autumn; come birth,
come death — it is all to him as though it
were not. For over and under and round
about he sees, like the Ancient Mariner,
Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life, and
things visit his ear dully and life slides by
like distant shores seen through a tropic
haze — himself caught in the debris, half of
him gravitating toward the Viewless, the
other half full socketted in matter.

Matter! There are those who have done
away with that clog. If one stay long
enough with inorganic, inanimate things,
concentrate his thought on their inertness,
their deadly calm, one becomes curiously
aware of something bordering on semi-

48 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE

intelligible expectancy in their attitudes.
The table, bed, chair in a room, under this
mental surveillance, will become half-
create. These dumb things, somehow, as
sume an air of questioning watchfulness —
as of embryons about to receive the spark
that will stir their limbs and engender move
ment. Motion and rest seem one thing, and
the Reality underlying each comes out
stark.

Mind and matter are one thing operating
in two ways under one primal impulse —
the impulse of appetite. There is a passion
of change in matter, and one of the results
of this passion has been the production of
mind. Matter is the subsidence of passion,
mind in the gross state.

If it were not for the principle of decay —
that is, the principle of evanescing change —
we should be able to see a tree become a
man in the evolutionary series before our
very eyes and the solidest boulder trans
form itself into a crying baby.

It was with this knowledge that Walt
Whitman apostrophised a tree as "Thou un
told life of me!" No man's life is long
enough nor his instruments of perception
keen enough to behold this translation. The

THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 49

imagination alone conceives it and knows
that it is so. The passion of Pygmalion
made of the statue of Galatea a breath
ing, living woman. The legend is eternally
true. The living are the dead made mani
fest; and the so-called dead are the living
unmanifest.

Every word we utter is but the utterance
of a drowsy phantom in our blood, the open
ing of the lips of a spectre. For this reason
in rare moments of self-consciousness our
voice sounds strange, far away, not ours.
It is the sudden perception of that great
truth: We are not ourselves.

The human soul, the Eternal Substance,
is the immortal Spectator and placid Ob
server of the endless recurrence of its own
shadows. Thought is the endless recurrence
of its dreams; movement the endless recur
rence of its method. At the end of un
imaginably vast cycles of time the Soul
swallows its own consciousness and draws
back into itself its shadows, which we call
matter; its dreams, which we call thought;
its method, which we call motion. And all
that was lies dormant in the Nought, a
possibility of Nothing. It is the Sabbath
of works and days. The Eternal Substance

50 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE

lives as a desire, and shadows and dreams
and motion are born again, and the endless
bitter burdens are taken up once more.

The native interior sense, the quick ap
prehension of the soul of things, some sud
den rebirth in the brain of knowledge that
had long lain dormant — this is the most
marvellous of human possessions. He who
has it in large measure may skip all learn
ing, for he has wisdom; and wisdom is the
instinct for values — a lightning in the soul
that strikes the husk of illusion from the
kernel of eternality and lays bare the essen
tial.

The deepest wisdom has nothing to do
with facts, with accuracy, with proof, cor-
roboration. Wisdom is the Fact. It is the
gift of the Intangible Life.

THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES

TO wish for the fulfilment of your
desire — that is childish. To fear the
fulfilment of your desire — that is
the beginning of spiritual senility. To de
sire not to desire — that is wisdom.

All great negations are at last splendid
affirmations. We renounce by desiring not
to have, and to say, "I refrain" is really
to say, "I will not to will." This is the
humor of all great refusals. We reject
the pennies because we covet the gold
pieces, and spurn brown bread for the
manna that may fall to us. There is a
latent Yea in each great Nay.

Absolute renunciations cannot be con
ceived. We forsake the worse for the
better, the gutter for the stars, counterfeit
days for real days, the senses for the super-
senuous. The dominating instinct can only
be overcome by a dominating instinct. We
are the gibes of an eternal Will. Turn
wheresoever we may we cannot escape it.
(51)

52 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES

When we give it battle we are most its bond
man. It smiles back at us from the end of
our swords, and when we flee from it, it is
both pursuer and pursued.

The militant renunciants, from the
Buddha to Schopenhauer, have been the
founders of powerful movements — power
ful negations, if one likes — strenuous nays.
These flesh-walled prisons were too narrow
for the mighty lusts of their souls ; this spin
ning green pebble was too small a stage
for their spirit-strut. They counselled renun
ciation here for a mightier life "elsewhere."
They would lay waste the temporal order
with the flaming fagots of their dreams, let
loose the thirst-parched hounds of endless
desire from their kennels of clay, rip the
mask from the minute, drain eternity of its
secrets, and plant their streamers of affirma
tion on the last cosmic ruin. Renunciation!
There is no such thing. No is a transfig
ured Yes. Renunciations are the cocoons
in which the delicate silk of our finer de
sires is spun.

The process of evolution, the whole of
that marvellous exfoliation from the amoeba
to Thomas Hardy, is a process of "renun
ciation," a progressive leaving behind, a

THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 53

sloughing off, an endless denial, an eternal
series of terminations that are beginnings,
and beginnings that are only valuable be
cause they record terminations. The uni
verse is eternally dying in order to live.
We give up what we must when we must.
A deeper necessity than our likes and dis
likes commands. We flower in pain. We
are exiles forever on the march to a Siberia
whose terrors are purely imaginative.

All thought is action renounced. The
elaborated brain of a Newton, the burrow
ing mental eye of a Shakespeare, the flame-
crowned dreams of a Keats — all record the
inbreedings of the spirit. The finer, the
higher life begins with a veto. Each new
law repeals an old one, and when we have
discovered the illusiveness of days we reso
lutely cancel the world in contemplation,
and "renounce" our hobbyhorses for Pega
sus.

Action is characteristic of life on the in
stinctive plane. A will-less inaction can be
reached only by the few. The centers of
inhibition develop late in life. With our
hand on that switchboard we may wreck
with a smile the blind, plunging impulses.
The iron-heeled spirit listens with pride

54 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES

to the crackling of the bones of dead selves
over which it stalks in grim-humorous de
fiance — those selves of a million yeas; those
luring, seductive selves tricked out in a mil
lion guises, that solicit him by night, by
day — selves born of a myriad lapses in a
myriad lives.

Procession, concession, recession — the
defiant "Forward!" "Forward!" of youth,
the compromises of half -disillusioned middle
life; the "peccavi!" of old age — that is the
psychical history of the average being —
the average being who only learns that life
is pure hallucination after going through
the horrors, who has no organ of divination,
who does not believe in sewage until he has
swum through a sewer. He renounces
when there is nothing left to renounce. He
confounds renunciation with death. And
Tolstoi is his prophet.

How few have learned the art of with
drawing from life noiselessly and yet with
dignity! On a day you have discovered the
mockery of it all; some curious and swiftly
knit suspicion has given you courage to rip
the wrappings from your universe, and you
behold where you thought to find God —
bah ! — a Cagliostro ! You announce from the

THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 55

market place your discovery. A million
voices hiss in your ear "Traitor!" The
totter-kneed gods on their pasteboard
thrones crack their whips at you. But they
avail not. You have become the spirit of
revolt and you will lay the world in the
dust. You have seen the core of creation
and the vacuity thereof. You have beheld
as in a vision the sinister Soul of things
and the grin thereon; and you strike back
in blind rage at the lies sacrosanct with
age that enmesh you.

Your rage is useless, admirable, asinine.
Spinoza glanced at the bill-of-fare, threw
it out of the window and took to lens -grind
ing. Quit the stews without noise; thus only
may one keep the beasts off his trail.

Tomorrow, that million-spired mirage*
city toward which the soul of man forever
wends its way; Tomorrow, with myrrh and
spice in her casket, her fingers tipped with
healing ointment for the wounds inflicted by
this unromantic, calendared today — To
morrow can be won only by wooing Today.
How few can renounce the next Now! Yet
that way alone lies wisdom. We live be-
tween-times, and nothing is. We are noc-
tambulists forever stepping off into space.

56 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES

We live between the minutes, in the mythic
state that separates and yet unites a here
and beyond. We never quite touch our ob
jects, never close wholly the hand on the
object of our desire. Always the essential
escapes — the essence flies just above our
heads. The St. Elmo fire of perpetual illu
sion flits around us, and we are our own
undoing.

We seek for a spirit of rationality in
things and do not find it because the seek
ing is itself irrational. Renounce the pur
suit of things and those things will glide
silently into your soul. Seek not and ye
shall find : Let us dig where we stand — there
is gold under our feet; the future is a
pocket, and the fine glint on the outposts
of things is but the phosphorescent reflec
tion from the corpses of dead pasts on a
vacuous perspective.

There is a fine irony embedded in the
spectacle of this unending chase through
fen and forest: bloodhounds on the scent of
eagles and butterflies; arrows, poison
tipped, sent hurtling after fireflies; vast
armies accoutred to the knees, making
forced marches to reach Cockayne.

Ring, Olympus, with thy eternal laugh-

THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 57

ter! for the solemnity of man is the comedy
of the gods!

The born renunciant's elaborated appa
ratus of inhibition is a labor-saving device.
He skips the living of life in order to at
tain a life that lives. It is not necessary
to experience in order to know. Some
souls hold the universe in solution at birth.
Their lives are excursions of verification.
They inventory the universe at a glance
and divert their lusts toward the stars.
Thrust into Eternity's Black Hole with its
three dimensions of Time, Space and Cir
cumstance, they disdain the wall-feeling,
wall-pounding and clamoring of their fel
low-prisoners. Instead they fix their eyes
on the white splendor of the dome — and
wait. The Keepers find their bodies rigid
in calm, a placid mock upon their faces.
Amid the babel their souls have passed out
through the little wicket in the great white
dome — passed into — well, what matter?

Life is a lewd game of tag played by I
Want and Catch Me.

In the last analysis our acts are but the
combustions of cells big with voids. And
our dreams are inbreedings — the obscene
junctions of impotent potentialities. Under-

58 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES

standing is the organ wherewith we finally
comprehend that nothing is. Discrimination
is that fine sense that places the dead fish
in one pile and the maggots that feed on
them in another. The passions are brewed
in the cardiac vats and their steam singes
and scorches the body with their senseless
urgings.

Life! a butchers' picnic in the Alhambra;
a column-cracked, half -foundered Venice;
a vermin-ridden Arcady.

Those fine young seers, "the predestined,"
who walk out of the gates of birth and with
swift and sure step dart to the center of
the banquet-room and overturn the grub-
table without tasting the edible junk have
abridged their lives, it is true, but what
they have missed they shall never feel the
need of. They might have eaten, you say,
and then judged. Satiety is the hog's
judgment. Renunciation ex post facto is
fashionable; besides, there are so many
spiritual Baden-Badens where one may
have his maw washed clean. Real renun-
ciants are born, not tolstoied.

The Intellect is the mirror of Passion.
She looks into that wondrous glass and
murmurs; "The same-— yet I cannot touch

THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 59

thee. You are my higher self shaped as a
face in smoke. I gave thee birth; you fol
low me; antic me and are my slave — my
pale and wondrous slave, as ethereal as I
am gross; my slave to whose beauty I ren
der thy shackles." Intellect, forged in the
foundries of desire, that is destined to strike
down the arm that poured it molten in the
brain matrices and gouge out the eye that
watched it cool to undestanding. It is the
Moses born amid the bulrushes and tangled
weeds of elemental passion — this mighty
Moses, light-smitten with Horebic visions,
bringing to the groundlings who will listen
a new tablet of laws.

Every fine action implies or characterizes
some aspect of self -conquest, which is an
other name for renunciation. Every fine
action is such because, fundamentally, it
is a negation; some door must be shut be
fore we open another. Life opens outward
to an inward. "I have gained on myself,"
murmurs the dreamer when he feels the life
energies boiling within him, and with the
sure hand of him who controls the powers
generated by Niagara Falls he directs those
energies into the channels mapped out on
the dream parchment of his mind. None

60 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES

but those who have experienced it know
of that virile joy, that bounding rapture,
of the spirit that deliberately smiles a de
fiant no to some old lure, some petty, tran
sitory tickle, and hears in his ear the long
halloa! of congratulation from somewhere
up the heights.

There is nothing in the world that is not
worth having, but there is nothing in the
world that is worth lifting the hand to ob
tain. We pay too much for our prizes; we
are the eternal dupes of the imagination.
An Epicurean receptivity, the desire to
know, to feel, to assimilate all things — with
a semi-humorous reservation as to the value
of the things received; a keen discernment
of the prankishness that reigns at the heart
of things; the ability to outlaw what you
cannot get; a looking without a lusting,
or to lust with one's hand on the valve; an
alien attitude toward joy, so when she
comes it is with the surprise of unexpected
good news — something of calm, some meas
ure of surcease from the terror of days may
be won in thus fronting life.

Man makes of his will the measure of his
demands. The dream versus the brutal
fact! — the theme of the finest tragedy and

THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 61

comedy. What incongruity! — a Hottentot
marooned on an iceberg, or an Esquimau
gravely assuring himself that the desert is
frigid. Man is capable of believing any
thing but the truth. Adaptability is the
process by which one gets used to the use-
lessness of things.

The intellectual renunciant, the pure
sceptic who has minimized the personal
equation in his quest for rationality (which
is, again, some principle that will coddle a
temperamental bias) assumes all truths to
be lies and all lies aspects of some truth.
His universal premise is the denial of all
premises — each premise being but the
termination of some anterior syllogism. But
he has faith: he assumes chaos. He rips
from himself all the tatters of mental cus
tom and aims at an oversight. His is what
Nietzsche contemptuously called "the im
maculate perception." The contradictori-
ness of things lies open to his vision. Im
pact, shudder, dispersion, recombination in
endless forms new and strange; this is his
ultimate formula, and beyond — the Black
Panel. What "highest" shall he choose in
this flowing frustration? In an evanescing
universe what shall he waylay that will give

62 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES

him more satisfaction than himself? He
turns within and chants with Walt Whit
man, "Me imperturbe." So he stands at
pause at the cross-roads, and life swirls in
and out of these highways at his feet. He
takes no road. The view is finer from the
forks. Besides, he has his secret.

HISTORY

THE pomp of many mythical yester
days — that is history. History must
be lived; it cannot be written. All
the paper in the world could not contain
the events of a minute.

As all the events of the past are saturated
with the imagination, written history is the
annal of man's illusions. The past is the
one thing we create at each minute. It is
the one thing that is revocable. It is the
one thing we can create in our own image.
There are as many Luthers, as many Napo
leons, as many Robespierres as there are
minds that think of them. The battle of
Waterloo is no more important than you
believe it is. Cromwell was a murderer or
a saint — you are the judge. There are no
facts; there are only beliefs. There is no
past; there is only the kaleidoscope of the
imagination. There is no history; there is
only myth.

In that back-travelling glance the trivial
(63)

64 HISTORY

becomes grandiose; the stupendous is
rounded off with the reservations of crit
icism. And this stained-glass hero who to
day stands all a-glitter in the magic of my
thought tomorrow I shall hurl into the ditch
of disillusion and cover with the quicklime
of venomous ridicule.

"Have you read history?" Some one once
asked me. "No," I replied. "I have never
even read historians."

Tell me the secret of the violet and I
will tell you the secret of God, a poet said.
Tell me the secret of this minute and I will
tell you the secret of all minutes. And
until you can tell me what that event means
which you call yourself I can tell you
nothing of the meaning of history. I do not
know that I am not a myth. So what can
I affirm of Caesar? Livy and Tacitus,
Gibbon and Carlyle reported their own
dreams, analyzed their own imaginations
and wrote down themselves. The only
archives from which they drew treasures
were the countless cells in the brain, and
their Messalinas and Hannibals and Mira-
beaus are as purely mythical as the Homeric
gods.

The hot, steaming imagination throws

HISTORY

65

off its moons which it calls its "facts."
Grote had an idea, and that idea had an
echo, and he called it Greece. Is there a
I history of England? No. There are
IHallam's England, and Green's England,
I and Macaulay's England.

Each man is the conscript of his tem
perament. We know the lying mask that
[Memory draws over the face of each par
ticular yesterday. And those infinite faded
yesterdays! Who shall unmask them shall

rite history! They are the monstrous pil
lars that stretch away into the Infinite,
each crowned with its separate Sphinx, each

ith its separate riddle, each veined with
countless hieroglyphics.

History is not fascinating, and indeed has
no reason for being, until some supremely
|great poetic liar — a Shakespeare, a Hugo,
or a Dumas — recreates it for us; or until
tsome seer blows into its body a fictitious
l which he calls a philosophic theory.
The historian must have a migratory imagi
nation. He puts clothes on ghosts. He is
the tailor of dead men. The past is his
clinic and he demonstrates over his own

'rankensteins.

History is, then, like the visible universe

66 HISTORY

itself, a fable of the imagination. What I
see there is there. To me it is merely an
excuse for setting down some thoughts on
the evolution of man.

All events from the first appearance of
man on the planet to the writing of these
words constitute an Iliad of ghastly jests.
Man is the anonymous atom. He is one
of the masks of the Supernatural. The
aspirations of races are born in Venetian
pomp. They all end in a Verdun. That
is the satiric repartee of our Antagonist
hidden behind the arras. The history of a
particular race is merely that race's ante-
mortem statement to posterity, which holds
an autopsy on its ancestor, and starts to
write its own ante-mortem statement.

The history of mankind! Listen! — and
you shall hear the forlorn music made by
drowsy Ghosts on violins of bronze.

History has a metaphysic. It is the will-
to-persist. The will-to-persist must not be
confused with the will-to-power of Nietzsche
or the will-to-live of Schopenhauer. It
includes both of these. It uses life and
power in order to persist.

The race denies death. The evolution

HISTORY 67

of man is the epic of Persistence. The spirit
reaches out for a Beyond at each of its
movements. To be Other, to be Elsewhere,
to be in the place where one is not — that
is the primal instinct.

Not to be is the only hell man ever
feared. Not to move is the only monstrous
thought that can be thought. Not to per
sist is the only blasphemy that repels him.
And all the torment of existence flows
from this will-to-persist, this inexplicable
need of going — on. Lashed, branded,
stoned, bludgeoned, kicked and cuffed from
hell to hell, spat upon by nature, vomited
back into life from out the ground where he
is laid, man fears but one thing: Boredom—
the boredom of eternal extinction. And the
knick-knack Gods and the sublime gib
berish of prayer and that vulgar scuffle
from territory to territory which is called
the "march of progress" are nothing but
the rumble and rattle of the Will-to-Persist.

The history of the nations is the search for
Utopia. The millennium is imminent —
just ahead. Egypt, Greece, Rome, China,
Japan, America — so many multiples of the
besetting, parasitic illusion of Man. The

68 HISTORY

sacred scroll containing that eternal prom
ise in jewelled letters unfolds before the
march of tribes and peoples. The New
Jerusalem is by the Tiber, on the Missis
sippi, on the Rhine, on the Nile.

Into the fastnesses of their dreams there
never comes a prowling doubt. Each peo
ple is the chosen people. The Capitol is
the Ark of the Covenant. Sidon, Tyre,
Alexandria, Athens, Rome, Paris, London,
Washington are the shining Ararats where
the tempest-tossed shall lodge in peace at
last!

History is, again, a museum of cant
phrases. Each nation, each people, has
its sacred syllable Om, which it repeats in
ecstasy. They are the aphrodisiacs of na
tional ideals. Ah, the sublime pneumatic
catchwords that keep the masses bowed and
allow the preachers of "our manifest des
tiny" to ride them pickaback!

Each generation stands waiting the
apocalyptic formula, which it fingers like
a favorite pimple. No great movement is
legitimate until a motto is stitched into the
minds of the masses.

"Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,"

HISTORY 69

"Taxation without representation is tyr
anny," "Remember the Maine," "For God
and Fatherland," "The Brotherhood of
Man," "Onward, Christian Soldiers,"
"Making the world safe for democracy,"
these are a few decoy cries of the Ideal,
the eternal blood-sucker, the unsurfeited
vampire that no atom is too small to con
ceal and no constellation large enough for
its traffic.

Give me a phrase and I will create mo
tion in dead masses. Give me a warcry and
I will invent a war. Give me an emblem
and I will lead a people. Give me a device
and I will overturn dynasties. With what
mighty blustering epigram did Lucifer
draw the rebellious hosts up before the face
of God? The Reformation began when
Luther tacked ninety-five phrases on a
Wittenberg church-door. The millions
who have fallen in battle from Salamis to
Chateau-Thierry fell to perpetuate maxims,
and those who survived were decorated with
medals and lived forever after in the efful
gent light of their favorite saw.

There is nothing more sentimental than
war. History is all sentiment. To "create
new values" a lie is necessary — a senti-

70 HISTORY

mental lie, a lie that shall be strong enough
to found kingdoms and cathedrals, lazaret
tos and pension lists, inquisitions and
Reigns of Terror. It must be strong
enough to justify the paranoia of a Joan
of Arc, the epilepsy of a Caesar, the sadism
of a Robespierre, the sublime mania of a
Napoleon, the pride of a Kaiser, the relig
ious fervor of a Charles the Ninth. The
eternal cant phrase! Thy will be done
here below and may thy monstrous charnel
houses top Arcturus!

The socialists are right when they say
the fundamental question is the economic
question. In history the whimper of the
belly dominates. In all uprisings the
bakeries are sacked first. The pinched
visage of Hunger overawes the world. Food
is the only God who has never been blas
phemed. There are no atheists to confront
him.

Man can live by bread alone. God,
patriotism, love, religion may be spurious.
Hunger is real. Hunger is a fang. Thirst
is a thug. The billions who have come out
of the earth and have gone into it were
all bellywise. Kings and Popes fear the

HISTORY 71

mutinies of the Belly beyond the wrath of
(Jod. When the people in Home beeame
restive the publie granaries were opened.
Uehind all the hubbub of the world, behind
the purple and the cloth, behind the cata
clysms of history, behind the mouthings of
the jingo gods of the masses, behind all
the painted scenery of civilization and bar
barism there stands the eternal breadline.
It is the skeleton in the closet. It is the
abominable Fact. It is the Banquo's ghost
at the feast of the masters.

History knows one Superman: it is
Lazarus. Against the animosity of the
empty stomach Reason, Logic and Com
monsense art! mute. It justifies every crime.
The hollow stomach is seditious. It is apos
tate to every religious, social and ethical
dogma. It is Anarch and Atheist. All his
tory plays satellite to Stomach.

Jn the beginning was the Helly, and the
Helly was with man, and the Helly was
man.

The m.-isscs! the masses! That mighty
strangled sigh that goes into the infinite!
The trillion-eyed being who sees nothing,
whose life is nothing, who is just the Mass!

72 HISTORY

They manure the glory of the great. They
drag the chariots of Charlemagne and
Csesar and Napoleon into the empyrean
and fall back into gaping graves below.

I have watched from a star stricken
with ague — a star that was old at the birth
of man on the earth — the hordes that have
lived here in this world. A meaningless
generation. A useless fecundity. A buf
foonery of nature. A flood of sap. The
stench of an enormous iniquity. Will the
earth never cease belching! Behold the In
finite on parade! Behold the flaming gey
sers of life! The uncountable, inscrutable
masses — pedestals of flesh and bone for the
8trong man — skulk back to oblivion, one
crawling over the other ant-wise. The
obscene, gluttonous, putrescent trillions —
the eruption of some eternal subhuman
hell.

The masses are the paid panders of those
notorious blackguards called great men.
Their great men are their Cloaca Maxima.
They are the incarnations of their criminal
instincts, the clearing houses of their hypoc
risies.

The masses without their heroes! Incon
ceivable. The average man in every age

HISTORY 73

has always been naturally a pimp. He is
the parasitic suckling of "the man of the
hour." His lips are forever sucking at the
nipple of a demagogue. The stars sparkle,
the seas surge and chant their magnificent
litanies in his ears, the seasons blow their
aromatic breaths into his face, cataracts of
light falling from inconceivable heights
lave his head — of this he sees nothing. He
prefers to worship a Corsican blackguard,
chant hosannahs to a spectacled monster
born in Aix, or stand in mute adoration
around the eloquent rump of his economic
Kaiser.

And at last the masses arrive at Democ
racy! The divine right of kings has become
the divine right of the masses. The crown
has been taken from the head of the ass
and glued on the head of the ape. We pass
from an assocracy to an apeocracy. The
slave of five hundred million years at last
comes to sit on a latrine (which he mis
takes for a throne). The meaning of the
ages is at last promulged, the Sphinx gives
up its secret, we have a clue to God, the
atom discloses its reason-for-being, it is the
ninth-month of historic gestation: the

74 HISTORY

masses are about to take possession of the
planet.

Verily now the earth belongs to the peo
ple. But the stars still belong to the poets.

THE PASSION OF DISTANCE

SPACE is the original sin; distance is
the mother of desire. Perspective
lends wings to the soul — and sets us
in the mud in amaze.

For we may not fly to that Alpine ridge
— nor to that thought that beckons at the
end of a mental perspective.

Alpine ridge and mental ridge are illu
sions of space, aerial promontories such as
we see on the stage — paint, cardboard and
grease; beautiful to behold, the parent
of an aspiration, but treacherous to land
on.

The pursuit of the spectres that inhabit
distance brings us at last to the terror of
the Infinite, to the monstrous, timeless
thing we call Eternity.

All philosophy is the attempt to batter
down walls, to shatter limitations, to reach
that utter distance called the Supreme
Generalization, where, if the adventurer
has the real buccaneer blood in him, he
(75)

76 THE PASSION OF DISTANCE

rests in eternal contemplation, fed forever
by his immortal distance passion.

Or if his soul be not yet strong enough
he flies, like Pascal, back a-trembling to
the skirts of the concrete, brain-mangled,
soul-shattered at what he has seen, seeking
shelter in the pomps of the transitory.

Philosophers are idea-drunkards. Their
heady abstractions — the rare vintages, as it
were, of all the illusions that clamber over
the deathless Spirit of Things, vine twisted
around vine — make of them lords of the
distances, abolishing as they do, for in
stance, the petty difference between an ant
and a star, between summer and winter,
between the first man and the last man.

It is Nature's great paradox of distance
that a watery pulp like the brain — a mere
thinking sponge that can be held in the
palm of the hand — can hold within itself
that stupendous conception of the evolution
of man from protoplasm to what he is; can
hold it not only in bits as scattered detail,
but as one single idea, to be envisaged in a
single flash of consciousness; an idea that
in the drop of an eyelash destroys each in
dividual existence and solves everything in
a law that sets all beginning and end at de-

THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 77

fiance, a law that requires an eternity of
time in which to body forth the secrets of
its deeps and uses infinite space as its
mould.

Approaching the monstrous — is it not? —
that that little globe perched so oddly on
the shoulders of Arthur Schopenhauer
should have secreted within its circumfer
ence that marvellous theory of the Will- — a
menstruum that before our very eyes va
porizes a late substantial universe and sets
the mind a-rocking and a-reeling in the
limitless. Sublime paradox indeed! — the
paradox of paradoxes. For here the lesser
holds the greater, the unlimited is found
secreted in the limited, the infinite in a skull !

The Hindu seer travelling his upward
Path rises from prospect to prospect with
a rapt joy blazoned on his soul, indulging
that passion of distance, that frenetic desire
to be lost in the Infinite, to be hub to a
million prospects, to be the vent of Time
and Space.

The yogi is the divine intoxicant, an
eater of form and matter. His hasheesh
is distance; his ultimate the complete ab
sorption of himself in a buoyant, spaceless,
timeless, shelterless Nirvana, where dis-

78 THE PASSION OF DISTANCE

tance has consumed distance, and where at
last there remains only the extensionless
Now,

Amiel, who like Pascal, was touched —
one may only be touched by it to retain his
sanity — by this passion for endlessness,
was transfixed into a lifelong inaction.

The Infinite had petrified him. His pas
sion for distance ended in a passion for
death, an ineradicable longing to escape
from the net of this and that, from the dull
mummeries of change, the tawdry pag
eantry of earth.

The average person holds fast to the
limited. The boundaries of the territory in
which he strolls — for the average man never
wanders — are as clearly marked out for
him as the streets of his native town. He
ambles through life the smiling prisoner
of use-and-wont, chilled by the unfamiliar,
the scarcely manumitted child of the cos
mic nurseries. He travels unsuspectingly
the well-worn grooves of sense, his mind
seldom expanding beyond the tip of the
nose or the nerve-centre of the longest
finger. He feels well-housed, safe in the
concrete, in the very real walls of his men
tal abode, surrounded by his imperishable

THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 79

lares and penates — with his unchanging God
of sundries in back of it all.

The thought never enters his mind that
that which he most firmly clutches has no
more reality than fountain spray, is, in fact,
a kind of coarsened ether — an equilibration
for a little while of imponderable force;
that the object most familiar to him is
nothing but an externalized state of con
sciousness, a thing of no-name really, only
dubbed "tree" or "house" or "chair" or
"woman" as a kind of makeshift for our
unalterable ignorance.

Still, this stands — this Thing of no-name
— in an infinite number of relations to an
infinite number of other things, capable of
an infinite number of destinies, with abysm
on abysm beneath it and incommensurable
distances ramifying in every direction from
it.

And yet on a day — a day ticked off,
maybe, on his mental calendar; or, not un
derstanding, left slide by, hardly noted —
this "average person," standing for a mo
ment on a mountain top or casting a
glance out to sea or unconcernedly tossing
his eye deep into the blue illusion over his
head, is aware of a swift inquiet, a sudden

80 THE PASSION OF DISTANCE

arrest of being, a falling sensation such
as. he may have experienced in a nightmare.
He has a vague glimpse of something that
can only be described as the Nothing-
EveryMng. Then he comes back in his
body again, sound, safe, with a grip of
death upon his world of thick cubes and
gravitating chattels.

He does not know exactly what hap
pened, but half -guesses that his soul had
been shot some distance out of his body —
or that his body had been suddenly shot
from under his soul.

The absorptive, annihilating Infinite —
abstract of all distances — had for an in
calculably small space of time swept him
away bag and baggage. The eye of his
soul had caught for a moment on its retina
a picture of the perdurable.

There are some faces that intoxicate us
with the illimitable prospects they open
up; faces that limn interstellar distances;
far-away faces, space-hallucinated, object-
blind — the forehead and eye recording so
expressively the vertiginous flights of the
soul.

Here, too, in these faces there is always
a touch of the wistful, such a look as we

THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 81

see on the faces of those who gaze expect
antly out to sea the day long; a touch of
nostalgia.

Be we ever so near to these beings they
are still, we feel, so far away really that
contact with them gives us back something
of the uncanny.

They bear the air of one sent on a
strange, perplexing errand by a malign
god. They have about them a vague pres
age of the ultimate destiny of the soul,
which seeks in each movement, however
trivial, the secret of that last unification,
that ultimate redemption within itself of
all distances, the final reclamation of all
horizons — and the meaning thereof.

THE COMIC VIEW

THE comic is Dissonance viewed from
the Imperturbable. Life is a con
tretemps. Life is an encounter be
tween I Would and Thou Shalt Not. Life
is Mind out for a lark. Life is what you
will, but the hiatus between what you will
and what you do not get is the great motive
for the humorous in art, literature and the
magazines.

Spencer says laughter is caused by a "de
scending incongruity." In plain English,
a "descending incongruity" is an un
expected tumble. Man describing a para
bola as he slips up on the banana peel of
Chance is the cause of that inextinguish
able laughter that reverberates from Olym
pus to Broadway.

George Meredith tells us that the comic
is the laughter of the Reason. And reason,
he might have added, is the laughter of the
Emotions.

The smile is the scintillant light that
(82)

THE COMIC VIEW 83

sparkles on the tear. The comic is the
tragic viewed from the wings. Humor
is the tabasco sauce that gives life a flavor.
It is mirth that keeps us sane.

The tragic is ridiculous because it has no
sense of proportion. The Tragic View
measures man against man. The Comic
View measures man against the universe.
One records the collisions of personality.
The other records the impact of the mis
chievous molecule against the irrevocable.

The Tragic View is defective because
it takes itself seriously and bombards etern
ity with its whimperings. The Comic View
is perfect because it takes nothing seriously,
chucks the menacing to devouring Time,
and impales the Inevitable on a smile.

The Comic View is exhilarating. It
mounts the barricades of limitation with a
hop-skip-and-a-jump. It knows the value
of all things. Science? Mere mumblings
in a vacuum. Life? A parenthetical affir
mative between two negatives. Honor? A
bauble for idealists. Love? Vascular ex
citation. Morality? A clever device of the
first impostor — the State. Tra-la!

Hoop-la! Hold up your paper hoops,
Master of Ceremonies, and see Merry-

84 THE COMIC VIEW

andrew dive through them and slit them
into shreds.

The Comic View is the cosmic view. The
world of time and chance is meaningless.
The Demiurge, the world-creator, is the
Browning of celestial mechanics: style
without ideas. The world is chaos drama
tized. The earth is the Farnese torso among
the scuptured planets. Life is a problem
in contingencies. Nothing eventuates. Ac
tions are webbed nothings spun by a Syn
copated Spider. Time is a loafer playing
at tenpins. And whether you drink, or
sleep, or make wry faces at Demigorgon,
or shy spitballs at Fate — it is all the same.
You dissolve at last in fine smut.

So get the Cosmic-Comic View before
you slough off and snuff out. Peep at
yourself en passant. Look at your mean
ingless gyrations and silly circumvolutions
from a perspective. Stop your sulking and
come up to Pike's Peak. Sitting recumbent
in your stews, you taint the air. Your
disappointments are bacterial. You litter
the things that devour you. Your sighs
are miasmatic. Your liver has got in your
eye and your heart in your boots. Get
flush with the Spirit that abides.

THE COMIC VIEW 85

The raucous guffaw of Rabelais rever
berates to this day. The silvery rill of
Cervantes — who dragged Prometheus from
his rock and set him tilting at windmills —
is Spain's immortal contribution to the
Comic View. The dry smile of Moliere
lingers on French letters. The metallic
chuckle of Mephisto — I believe it was his
chuckle that saved Faust! And even the
sardonic grin of Aristophanes is as broad
today as it was when it first split his face.

These are the wondrous mirrors that
image the human contretemps and flash back
our calamitous comicalities. Here man
kind is skewered on the poignant wit of
genius. Could we read Balzac at a single
sitting the best of us would forever re
nounce life. How grotesque are our days!
How aimless our actions! How petty our
passions! The "Comedie Humaine" is a
picture of a huge animal chasing its tail.

Louis Lambert mistook the cataleptic
trance for the Kingdom of Heaven! Pere
Goriot gave up all for love and died of
starvation! Old Grandet desired gold and
wallowed in it; his daughter Eugenie de
sired love and died a pallid virgin. And
yet Lowell says, "God may be had for the

86 THE COMIC VIEW

asking!" Balzac knew better: It is the
gods who may be had for the asking.

Man darts out of negation and begins
to scratch the ground like a chicken out
of the egg. With what care he builds the
house of life! With what seriousness and
pride he goes about his daily tasks! He
begins each day at exactly the same place
he began the day before. But being serious,
he lacks omniscience. He builds as though
it were for eternity, as though Death — the
joker in the stacked pack — did not lie in
wait for him. His house is suspended in
air, and for every brick he puts on the edi
fice a brick at the bottom drops silently
into space. He is a mechanical figure mov
ing on a grooved stage between the right
wing of Despair and the left wing of Ennui.
His spiritual tympanum has been destroyed
in the great Boiler Factory. Else he would
renounce and smile.

To reach the comic height you traverse
the Valley of the Shadow. The Country
of the White Lights is reached only through
the Land of Ultra- Violet Despairs. You
first wander through the pits of implacable
negations and beneath sickly, pitted suns,
and keep tryst with Succubus.

THE COMIC VIEW 87

The pinnacle of the ludicrous is attained
only after having won all sorts of nasty
opinions of yourself. The little peeping
double on high is evolved in travail. In
early life our theories of personality are
geocentric and our social universe is Ptole
maic. On our dear tear-mildewed souls we
mirror the earth and the fatness thereof.
Everything revolves around us. The Self
is garbed as Hamlet. What eyes behold us !
How our every action is recorded! We
manufacture utterly absurd moral systems
that we imagine others think we ought to
live up to. We shed oceans of tears be
cause ourself doesn't like ourself . The very
stars we believe to be spy-glasses pointed
straight at our mewling and puking souls.
Oh, the agonies of the self-conscious — the
parturition of self from self! Ego, like
protozoon, multiplies by fission. Each new
thought is born with the evil eye.

But sudden on a day the black garb is
doffed — we know not how. Tears cease to
flow, and the sob ends in a squeak. We
are aware of a synthesis, an amalgamation,
a blending as of many waters.

It is the miracle of perspective. What
was all this pother about? Who is this

88 THE COMIC VIEW _____

blubberer? I turn aside, watch myself come
and go, and now smile indulgently at my
antics. Funny little fellow, you there — erst
myself — with your labors and loves and
mouthings! Hi, little fellow there, come
amuse me; give me a jest or break a bottle
with me; sing me a funny woe-begone
serenade beneath Dolores' window; or let
me see your funny little legs sprint to the
tomb. Hey there, little mannikin that once
I thought a giant Thor, what deviltry will
you be up to tomorrow?

There is a wail in the night. A babe is
crying for the moon. The wail has ceased;
the babe has cried itself to sleep. This is
often called renunciation. But the Comic
Self on high smiles. He knows.

THE ARTIST

THE artist!
He garners the world in a dream, and
lo ! the dream is more real than reality ;
he touches the dead and they tremble back
into life and are more vital than the merely
galvanized beings that stare at you in the
street; his brain is fecund of worlds, of real
men and women, systems and great cosmic
dramas.

What you see, what you feel is not real;
only feeling and seeing and understanding
are the immortal realities. The mind in
corporates the world, and what the artist
gives forth is Chaos transfigured, turmoil
stilled in its frenzies, the old foolish ges
tures called action transfixed on an Idea.
The difference between art and life is
the difference between reality and a mir
ror — art being the reality, life the mirror.
Art is the reality because it is the exact
record of what we feel and know, of what
we aspire to be, of the ideal — hence real —
(89)

90 THE ARTIST

self -enactment. Life is only a faint reflec
tion of our desires, and so the poet, the
painter, the dreamer as men are ghosts,
mere flesh-films; but their poems and their
pictures and their abstractions are the
highest reality. Our ideals and our in
stincts are our standards; and in a book,
a poem, a picture, a statue, these ideals
and instincts live to their fulness.

Life wakes only our caricatures; art
wakes the spiritual protagonist complete,
substantial, sempiternal.

Art takes life for its theme. Life has
no theme. Practical life is aimless; it is
the reel of a homeless, drunken man. It is
detail, detail, detail, infinitely spread. Our
acts are stop-gaps between moments of
painful disillusion — mud-floundering at
their best. The artistic spirit constructs
ends; having attained them, it rests, a
marbled, immortal contemplation. It dwells
in an everlasting Now, and has the power
to hallow smut and aureole the beast.

My vision! Who can take that from me?
My impassioned dream that burst my
brain-dikes and overflowed on to canvas,
that forced the marble block to yield its
curved secrets, or that flashed on paper as

THE ARTIST 91

a rhapsody — that is the real moment, over
against which the seething caldron of muti
lations we call the "great world" has only
that validity for being that a fertilizer has.

The particular seen as a particular has
no meaning. No man can understand any
thing until he thinks abstractly. The differ
ence between the breed of slugs that move
from point to point, from fact to fact,
feeling their way like a snout along a dung
hill, and the godlike apprehension of the
great creative artist is not a difference in
degree but a difference in kind of brain-
stuff. The mental difference between the
Black Fellow and the anthropoid ape is
not as great as the mental difference be
tween a plantation darky and Henry James.

Life is mean and petty to most people
because they lack the artistic instinct. They
see John and James, and they are com
monplace. But read of John and James
as Balzac saw them or a boor as Thomas
Hardy saw him and the scales have fallen
from your eyes. The finite has no longer
any existence as such; the individual has
ceased to be an individual: the man be
comes a type; an abstraction made flesh —
or breathing flesh become an abstraction;

92 THE ARTIST

an insulated force; a concourse of ideas;
an entombed universe.

It is this exaltation of consciousness —
this challenge to the commonplace, this war
of the Idea on the tyranny of the senses
that would cudgel the soul to an abject sub
servience — that constitutes the superiority
of the art-instinct over the life-instinct.
That which we touch too often is either
destroyed by us or destroys us. The habit
ual kills wonder and familiarity slays awe.
The Alps guide has no sense of the gran
deur and mystery which surround him;
the astronomer sweeps the constellations
nightly with his telescope and soon he
dwindles to an automatic calculating ma
chine. And the crowds of the pavement
have no eye for the sublime. Did not the
sun and moon rise yesterday? And Venus
in her brilliance is only "pretty."

Walt Whitman one day crossed over to
Brooklyn on a ferryboat. Years after he
wrote a poem called "Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry," and all who now read that poem
want to cross the river and see the sky, the
boat, the gulls, the deck-hands as Old Walt
saw them.

The great artist is a seer; he stands out-

THE ARTIST 93

side of the world. The human race fills
in a perspective. The creative dreamer
is sundered from environment — he is his
own milieu — he is brain-light, detached cell-
ecstasy. He beholds the endless procession
into being from out of the womb of nonen
tity, and etherealizes God and diatom. The
writhing, pain-gutted phantoms called men
are the Epic of Evil, an epic of the artist's
creation. He alone is likest God.

Whether we writhe in the strait jacket
of pain or are solved in the radiant monot
ony of a transcendent Perfection; whether
we have flouted all the seductive but venge
ful sanctities in our effort to preserve the
greater sanctity — self — whether we have
challenged all the wooden deities of time
and reviled the Arch-Bungler each day —
these things which we have done or have
not done are significant but seldom of
practical importance. The creative intel
lect looks down upon himself and draws
the essential facts out of its experiences
and fashions them into images.

The artistic temperament is the philo
sophic temperament, and good and evil and
the codified cant called the moralities are
the clay with which the creative dreamer

94 THE ARTIST

works; they have no other use. If a "sin"
yield me truth or beauty it is no longer
a sin. But this privilege belongs only to
the strong. Weakness is the preroga
tive of power — only the strong man
can afford to transgress. Before he falls he
knows he will be up again. He never loses
his strength. The great soul — the self-
centered artistic temperament — thrives on
his poisons, because to him they are not
poisons. He would not always be with the
Highest because his Highest alone is sure.
The transgressions of the weak have no
ideality in them. The weak, in reality,
never transgress; they merely lapse.

Nietzsche, Ibsen, D'Annunzio, Whitman!
— four great storm petrels of the Inland
Sea, workers in the Time-Mist, somber
heralds of dawn — or night. Their dreams
are sublime futilities, but dreams that
swaddle us in an aura of godhood. Could
the crowd grasp them, could the world
enact in its drab, vulgar way the passion-
glozed hallucinations that are blown from
the skulls of these men, life would lose its
flavor, ideal transgression its fascination,
and evil and good their aesthetic value.

Only ideal transgressions are worth

THE ARTIST 95

while; action is comic. What the gods wish
to destroy they first make real. Were we
all Hamlets, lagos and Lears no one would
read Shakespeare.

Give us our immortal dreams, show us
ourselves as we are not, give us the riot of
our anarch minds ; foil us, foil, us, eternally
foil us, that we may dream again! Let the
scavengers scrape the gutters for coppers
and duck in the mud for dimes. They are
the "Captains of Industry" — the grimy,
smutty captains of the marts and their
"industry" a grimy, smutty, lurid hell.

Philosophers are artists in ideas. They
are the white heralds of the Great Release,
eagles of the Infinite; they solve the iron
thong of earthly limitations in a molten
white idea, and walk not on terra firma.
The creative philosopher seems in his
highest flights to dam the eternal flux and
in his widest generalizations to erase acci
dent. In Time under protest, he stands
equipped for eternity, and his calamities
are his foods. The abstract mind flows into
the matrices of the concrete and changes
the shape of the moulds. It hoods itself
under all forms, but is none of these. It is
that which perceives, but is never perceiv-

96 THE ARTIST

able. It sucks from a world of illusive ap
pearances the marrow of reality, and spits
whole epochs of social movement upon the
gleaming point of a generalization. The
philosophic mind of the first order packs
all of history, with its crescendos and de-
crescendos of joy and woe, its evanishings
and recrudescences, under a single scalp,
and finds in the perversities, aspirations,
meannesses and cruelties of a single soul
the history of mankind in action.

There lies in each soul a history of the
universe ; indeed, the soul of each is nothing
but embryo and cadaver — the new spring
ing from the old, life springing from death.
Each impulse to action is a ghost seeking
flesh again, some old dead ancestral self,
scenting from its arterial prison-house its
ancient loves. Within the recesses of your
clay, mewed in brain-cell or aorta, there
live Charlemagne, Christ, Peter the Hermit,
Nero, Judas, St. Francis of Assisi and
Shelley. Your temptations, your betrayals,
your cruelties, your asceticisms, your
penances, your will-to-power, your "cry for
light," your lusts — that is history, and it
needs not Gibbon in six ponderous tomes
to tell me why Rome decayed. The poison

THE ARTIST 97

that killed Rome is in me, and the fate of
America I can forecast in a study of my
own strengths and weaknesses. The Law
works everywhere. It is the one single
reality. It is the immovable screen against
which Time projects her endless shapes.

The commonest objects have this in com
mon with the sublimest spectacles which
nature or man offers: they are at bottom
but phantoms of the brain, modes of
cellular life. Children and geniuses bear
on their faces a look of exalted wonder.
That mingled expression of perplexity,
awe, amazement on the face of a child when
fingering a button on your coat differs only
in degree from the feeling in the poet's soul
when for the first time he sees Mont Blanc.
The same feeling of wonder overcomes the
philosopher when, step by step, he has
tracked the variegated universe back to an
impalpable, eternally persisting Force. A
touch of the soul melts solids to fluids, and
a flash of insight in the brain of man dis
covers to him the great cosmic cataracts —
and we humans the perpetually evanescing
debris on their surfaces.

We are travelling toward the zenith of
Self, and all great art is a report of the

98 THE ARTIST

progress made. Action is only valuable
because it engenders reaction; because it
shocks the brain to thought and moulds
the soul to pictured moods which seek ex
pression. The shocks, the moods, the visions
are real; the objects that caused them are
brain data.

The world is my dream, but I the
Dreamer am everlastingly, else I could not
say "It is a dream."

UNDER A MASK

THE right to live implies theft. If
you cannot take, you cannot live.
Seizing and assimilating to one's
needs the things that lie about us are pri
mary notions. There is no law that sets a
bound to any special manifestation of the
law of acquisitiveness except another and
opposing special manifestation of the same
law. In organized society we pillage under
prescribed conditions, plunder within limits;
what we call social justice is merely the
machinery by which we regulate theft.

The eternal combat waged between the
House of Have and the House of Want —
that is, between ability and inability — is the
clash of gigantic forces which lie in the
nature of things, so far as we know them.
It is true, indeed, that the combatants
drape their nakedness in all manner of
gaudy apparel and that they fly beautiful
home-made banners with little touch-and-go
ethical mottoes; but these romantic trap-
(99)

100 UNDER A MASK

pings please the stay-at-homes mostly — the
drowsy Utopians, with their ideals of lazi
ness which they, again, with that incurable
idealizing instinct of theirs, nickname self-
development.

"All property is robbery" — that is the
reason why we hold all property to be
sacred. What I possess I have wrested
from some weaker being by superior
strength or craft or subterfuge, or under
the patronage of some legal lie. The
effort involved, this final appropriation of
a thing after a life-and-death struggle in
which all the life -forces are engaged — this
is what gives value to property and
apotheosizes it in our eyes.

"All property is robbery" — that is abso
lutely true, but to say that robbery is an
evil is false. Who will probe the subtleties
of theft in organized society? Who dare
trace his smallest possession to its begin
nings? All the things we own are smeared
with blood and tears, and our triumphal
marches are over the skeletons of the lost.
Each one takes what he must; each takes
what he dares to take; he calls it the "self-
preservative right," ignoring the implica
tions of the phrase. For the right to pre-

UNDER A MASK 101

serve one's self carries with it the right to
slay and steal until the self be perfectly
balanced with its own youthful dreams of
well-being.

In the last analysis, all law and custom
exist to safeguard and benefit the individual,
who is the race-unit, the ultimate appraiser
of all values. There is no such thing as
"the common good," for there is no good
common to all. "Perpetuity of the race"
is inconceivable unless the well-being of the
individual is conserved. Thus we have the
paradox: Government, in the name of the
"common good," destroying the units of
which it is composed. Society is an ab
straction that has got itself organized. It
"safeguards" the rights of the individuals
by taking away his rights and makes him
"upright" by clamping him in a strait-
jacket. Like most romantics, the State is
totally devoid of humor.

Who bound me to follow "social ends"?
Where did I precontract to labor and sweat
for the "common good"? — to offend my
self by feeding it with ill-smelling phrases
when it sickens for a life that lives, a voy
age against the stars, or into hell if so I
please?

102 UNDER A MASK

The ideal of good citizenship is the philo
sophy of servants. They pass and repass
before themselves — the herd; they pass and
repass before their heaven-created State
like a fop before his mirror — admiring,
smirking, titillating themselves with their
own magnified image. Their slogan is
Progress and their problem: How may we
become smaller? Of growth they know
nothing — growth, which is to pass beyond
yourself, you the individual, you the iso
lated one. Leave the flock, outlaw yourself,
you will be original and immoral; for all
originality is "immoral."

The weak panoply themselves in codes
and systems. It is their slowly evolved
organ of defense against the strong — a spe
cies of vengeance, urged of course in the
name of justice. How may I survive?
asks the weak man. Organize the State
and plunder the strong, whispers his con
science. All popular uprisings are attempts
to impose upon the strong the very yoke
which the weak are trying to cast off — the
yoke of slavery. The slogan is always
"justice"; the secret intent is revenge; the
result is triumphant incapacity. The strong
man's justice is always justice — that is,

UNDER A MASK 103

three parts of the cloak for himself and the
remaining part for the beggar. The weak
man's justice is only equality — a phrase
that corresponds to nothing but the letters
that compose it.

Communities — cities, countries — what
signify all these various forms of herding —
this formal amalgamation of Custom's
slaves — against extraordinary states of
consciousness in a few chosen individuals?
'Till the seer and the prophet and teller of
news comes, accoutred in rebel garb, life
has no significance. Life is merely the irk
of a long sombre day, a crouching in a dingy
corner of the universe listening with bated
breath to the long-reiterant menace of
death, a parley with the unseen, eyeless ills
crouching bellywise by our sides — 'till the
challenger comes, he who augments Fate
with a larger destiny — and goes to his
Calvary. Out of the commonplace rises the
interpreter of the commonplace; forth from
organized government comes the unorgan
ized rebel.

The outlawed being may offend aesthet
ically, but he cannot offend morally; what
he does may not be beautiful, but it cannot
be wrong. He may bungle the scheme, be

104 UNDER A MASK

clumsy and awkward, build himself un-
mathematically ; but if he is sincere he can
not be wrong ; [self -fulfilment is the only
moral law. The thing that I must do is
always right. j Evil treads the same path as
goodness, but it goes further; it is the un
curbed, the unleashed, the uncalculating,
and, always dazzling the imaginations of
men, is worshipped as power under various
guises; it even taking the garb of humility.
There are no bad men; there are only
men who affect us badly; men who reject
our way to felicity; who will have none of
our blessed state. "Sweetness and light"
are bitterness and darkness to a nature that
finds delight in danger, war, depredation.
Cain did boldly, in the full light of day,
what Abel would probably have done from
the thicket, for Abel was heaven's first
sycophant; Cain, earth's first man who
dared. Cain stood upon the dignity of his
soul. Abel was the forerunner of those
who perpetrated all the conceivable devil
tries which the mob-soul is heir to for the
"glory of God" — a justification which to
day steals among us under a new mask,
"the welfare of the race." The criminal —
so called — preys upon Society in the name

UNDER A MASK 105

of his instincts; Society preys upon the
criminal — so called — in the name of an ab
straction. The State, once anointed of
heaven, has now become the anointed of
man, and those who were formerly of God
are now the lobbyists of the Summum
Bonum.

The strong man seeks out evil; the weak
man is sought out by evil The doctrine
of evil for strength's sake, of rebellion for
the soul's sake, is not for the domestic
animal, nor yet for the jackal; nor may
cripples become gymnasts nor kitten-eyes
dart glances at the sun. At last, and al
ways, the mob must have its footpaths.
Few there are who dare walk the shifting
surfaces of the Milky Way; few are born
to voyage against the North Star.

Wreak your soul on Life. Use your
powers. Never question whether they are
moral. Once you put the question you are
already weak.

And 'ware the sly Delilah, Miss Morality,
and her lupanar, the State, with its oils
and balsams and mighty gelding-knife!

A MEMORABLE ESCAPE

PHILOSOPHY is the keyhole
through which the curious may peep
into the smithy of the Eternal, where
the great iron laws are forged.

The quest for truth is the human fond
ness for novelty — a highly specialized in
fantile trait. You must become as little
children to set forth on these trackless
mental wastes. Like children, you will be
buffetted hither and thither by a million
impulses. All things must be tried and
tested — and cast away. To the mind of a
child nothing has been proved, nothing dis
proved; all paths lie open. There is no
evil; no good that has not the mark of hu
man expediency on it. To the seer and the
child there are no dogears on the pages of
Life's book; no one has been there before,
and it matters not what is written on the
page — read, and pass on. All things must
be approached in innocence and with a
naive fearlessness. It is literally true that
(106)

A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 107

you must become as little children in order
to see.

I wish to see men, like Spinoza, as lines,
planes, bodies and circles, and so study
them. Still, while I wish to see them thus
for purposes of passionless dissection, it
must not be forgotten that men are not
lines, planes, bodies and circles — that they
are living masses of matter in pain, and
that there is more logic in their blasphemies
than in their prayers.

The relation of man to the Great Neces
sity which is called God is not an ethical
relation but is a geometrical one. There is
no such thing as Providence; what we mis
take for such is cosmic economy.

When the mind first perceives the illusory
nature of the heart's greatest desire it is at
that moment that the individual has taken
his first step along the upper cosmic tracts.
Once this glimpse is caught, there is no
permanent back-going — there may be lapses
to lower levels, a slipping back; but forever
and ever the hyper-physical eye shall re
member that one glimpse it caught of the
Infinite.

It is at this moment that the larger lust
begins. Earth life thenceforward will be a

108 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE

kind of long sickness, with the salt savor
of that endless sea forever stinging the
nostrils of the mind, begging it hence and
away.

He who believes that good is the end of
the universe, tolerate him; he who believes
that evil is the end of the universe, respect
him — but he who says that ends are myths,
follow him!

Looking from a very high building down
on a great city one is powerfully impressed
almost at the first look with the evident
absurdity of life. One receives exactly the
same impression as he ascends in intelli
gence, The eye and the mind are here in
startling agreement.

Progress defined for the highest mind is
a motion away from the centres of motion,
an accretion of insight. The active being
flows toward his objects; the contemplative
being has objects flow to him.

All the waves of Time can be held at
peace in the lap of the mind, all delusions
can be held in the pupil of the eye, and the
mouth of pain can be twisted into a smile.
Against the infinite screen of Self the
world-shadows come and go, and the fire
flies of knowledge emit their light and fall

A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 109

dead forever, and Chance undulates in
countless waves, or swirls and spouts, bear
ing peoples and nations to the crest and
silently dropping them into the hollows
of Oblivion. Against the screen of Self
is all this pictured, and each one may see
it, for each is that Self.

If the objects of the so-called material
universe are nothing but states of conscious
ness, then there is no one particular state
of consciousness that has a greater validity
than any other state of consciousness. If
the mind is merely an interpretative organ —
a way of rendering things, a manner in
which the individual reduces an aspect of
the Great Mystery to some degree of ra
tionality — and if minds differ not only in
degree but in kind, then Reality is an indi
vidual problem, and my universe is not your
universe, my Reality not your Reality.

There are as many laws as there are sepa
rate existences. Huxley tells us about
chalk, Plotinus about the Infinite, Sweden-
borg about angels. Can it be said that
Huxley's interpretation of the images in
his mind produced by an utterably unknown
object in his hand is an interpretation that
comes closer to some central Reality than

110 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE

the interpretation of the images in the mind
of Swedenborg produced by some peculiar
ity of his organism? If the angels were an
hallucination, why not the chalk? If Ploti-
nus was the dupe of his images when he be
lieved that twice in his lifetime he had united
with the Infinite, so is every being the dupe
of his images when he unites himself with
the finite.

We are no more "rational" than is nec
essary for our continuance.

Those states of consciousness which come
from a diseased brain, and which we call
insanity, are valid for the insane. Grotesque,
fantastic, irrational they may be; but no
less grotesque, fantastic, irrational, imbe
cile are the actions of all who dwell in the
finite to the eye of the Yogi, the eman
cipated mind.

Delusion and aimlessness are the ear
marks of insanity; delusion and aimlessness
are the earmarks of planetary life. One
need but look from a height.

Pleasure consists in the passing from a
lower perfection to a higher perfection —
that is, from a less complete realization of
Self to a more complete realization of Self.
Its condition is the instinct to eternal rebel-

A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 111

lion, an undying tendency to negative all
seeming finalities.

The mind lives in the Eternal in the
degree that it puts aside intent, aim, object.
They who shoot at targets never see the
heavens. Inveterate swimmers are at last
lost in the element they sport with. All in
tention is proscription and smells of death.

To the contemplative mind one hour is
the measure of the life and death of a
million suns — one day the hour-glass of all
eternity.

The cosmic mind can have no evil
thoughts; the vilest things can be pictured
there and smiled at, as sunlight may lie
over a brackish, slimy pool and will none
the less be spotless light, or, again, as vile
pictures can be shown on a white screen and
leave the whiteness untarnished.

To understand a thing thoroughly for
ever puts that thing beyond the pale of
hatred; to love a thing merely is to sub
ject oneself to the possibility of hating
that thing. Hence, understanding is the
highest thing in the world because it in
cludes hate. The emancipated reason of
man is the Holy Innocent.

The illusion of good and bad : in the per-

112 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE

formance of a "good" action the mind is
focused on the effect that it voluntarily de
sires to bring about, heedless of the law that
each act begets a multitude of other acts
which have no relation in morals to the pri
mal intention.

Pain is wrought by the intrusion of a
personal desire, opinion, or prejudice in
the presence of an inexorable law.

Misery, in the last analysis, is neither
social, political nor racial; it is caused by
the inability of the individual mind to dis
criminate between what is its good and
what is its not-good. Social evils, so-called,
are merely the lumping together of the
many ignorances of many minds. Where
all are blind all must fall into the ditch.
He who can discriminate goes free.

The higher the intelligence the finer the
powers of discrimination, the more things
you will reject; the more things you reject
the freer you will become. All social
"remedies" direct us how to get more, not
how to be more, how to become more. The
rich dominate the poor; as a remedy the
poor purpose to dominate the rich. Where
in lies the difference ? The hawk watches the
chicken and the chicken watches the worm.

A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 113

That is, in brief, the game of society.
Unless you abide in Self you are evil.

Evil is always becoming good; good is
always becoming evil. Change is readjust
ment ; and what we mean by eternal change
is eternal readjustment. Hence progress
is an illusion. For progress presupposes
a constant net gain in an eternal process.
Which is the same thing as saying that
if we pour a peck of peas into another peck
measure we have two pecks of peas.

The intellect cannot sin; what is called
conscience is a wordy war in the blood — a
strictly pathologic symptom; the brain
listens to the dispute, and the "still small
voice" is born. But the brain may smile
and smile and forever be a villain. All
things are permitted it.

All future events are decided — the intel
lect merely reveals the manner of the in
tention. Each tomorrow is already past,
and related to eternity you have already
died; related to Time, you still live.

The thoughts in the brain are nothing
but the bodily appetites in another form.

All human development tends to the
generation and perpetuation of error, for
the more complex man's activities become

114 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE

the greater the number of illusions it re
quires to stimulate his diverse activities. If
man in his growing complexity were get
ting nearer and nearer to some great eter
nal, unifying truth, his activities would de
crease as he neared the goal and human
life would be characterized by a greater and
greater simplicity.

The brain is the flower of organic life,
and our thoughts the petals on the flower.
The shedding of these petals, the ceaseless
dropping, fading, of our thoughts reveal
finally the worm in the bud — the nothing
ness of man and the futility of desire.

Emotion is the elemental cosmic fire; in
tellect the cleansing, soothing waters.

Herbert Spencer tells us that we cannot
get beyond states of mind; thus we can
never know the Reality of which mind is
a mode of expression. In positing this
Reality he had denied the possibility of
apprehending it — a contradiction. There
is a Consciousness that is not a state of
mind; it is something immediately given —
and in rare moments we know we are that
Consciousness. Its presence is not appre
hended as a state of mind; it cannot be
thought about — indeed, it vanishes the mo-

A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 115

ment we think about it — that is, the moment
we have a "state of mind" about it.

In these moments we know that all our
states of mind — personality itself — are
merely a lower activity of that Super-Con
sciousness. It is not known through thought,
but thought is known through it. It is
felt as a Presence when there is the least
conscious thought in the mind. It is known,
apprehended, with a degree of certainty to
which a transitory state of mind can never
attain. It comes as a supreme Awareness,
abolishes by absorbing Object and Sub
ject, Time and Space. It is the datum of
which states of mind are mere infinite data.

Flee wheresoever we may we cannot es
cape the Centre. The universe is composed
of infinite centres; circumference and diam
eters are illusions. Endless space is end
less centre. All evolution is a movement
from centre to centre, because any point
bounded on all sides by the Infinite must
be a centre. 'The centre of immensities, the
conflux of eternities" — there is nothing
conceivable that is not always there — and
There is always Here, for other than Here
there is naught.

The highest kind of action is meditation.

116 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE

Memory may cease, identity may lapse,
consciousness may blow out, but Life can
not end.

THE MASQUERADE

THE belief in an external universe is
the superstition of the senses. Of hear
ing, seeing, feeling and tasting have
we woven these filaments of matter and
garnished the immeasurable hollows of the
cosmos with stucco and pilaster of seeming.
The brain itself is only a dream of conscious
force and this body of mine but a haunted
house, itself forever withering and crumb
ling under the strain of its mutabilities.

The Ego, turning everlastingly on its
pivots of inexorable activities, whelps its
eerie spectres which the whimpering thirst
for the familiar in man kneads to a provi
sional hard-and-fast universe.

Change is avid of her spawn, and the
slime of circumstance breeds the brilliant
bubbles which we are, only to suck us back
into the swart of the grave, which is the
womb of newer bubbles.

I move, I talk, I gesture between the
thing named zenith and the thing named
(117)

118 THE MASQUERADE

nadir, but who shall tell me what I move
toward when eternity and infinity stretch
before and behind me? I speak, but who
shall put a value on my speech when the
ambushed forerunning Minute shall blend
my voice into the spirit of a million gales
and split my words into their infinite sound-
particles? I gesture, but what do I hail
when the phantom I hallooed had started
out of the same hollow heart of things as
my gesture? We stand upon a platform of
shadows and hail the echoes of Appearance.
We are the dials that mark no time; we
are clocks with our circumferences every
where and our pivots nowhere. Out on the
crag of our supremest imaging there is
nothing but — imagining!

See that headless, trunkless, footless,
brainless spirit of man with its one tentacle
of desire sprung like a hair from off the im
mobile, unstirred surface of the pre-crea-
tional protoplasm — that hair-like tentacle
feeling its way from the cellars of the Un-
create up into the life-possibility, coming
out of its swoon of a trillion cycles in
nullebiety, bulging into — aye, fathering —
this phantasmal universe of the "hypocritic
days."

THE MASQUERADE 119

See how it wove that fantastic cycle of
law which we call evolution, but which is
only the ghostly tape-measure in the hands
of we Wraiths of Desire. Evolution is
only the method by which matter changes
from protoplasm to putridity and the
method by which mind ascends from imita
tion to extinction.

There lie cancelled in the sepulchres of
the brain-cells and blood-cells of man more
ingenious universes than all accumulated
Mind can imagine; worlds the strange en
ginery of which would turn mankind into
gibbering idiots if they ever caught a
glimpse of them through some freak of the
subconscious, ghost-fabricating spirit that is
the soul of us. The ghosts of the antique
worlds that are socketed down there in
Time's soundless voids ! When they walk we
shall have a glimpse — if we retain our
reasons — of the absurdity of this latest
makeshift of the imagination in which we
live.

So these cosmic trial-rooms have come
and gone, and we arid they are the million
anatomical experiments of the Thing.

Moonless, starless universes there have
been, and stones with brains, and men and

120 THE MASQUERADE

women who grew from trees, and lank,
gigantic, formless beings who strode from
abyss to abyss, and furry imps with twelve
senses, and things innominable in universes
that fructified and waned and shrunk into
huddled corpses and are no more. Or, they
live as faint reminiscence in backworld
dreaming souls, little wrinkled memories in
the byplaces of the subconscious, the half-
erased memorabilia of the Almighty
Mockery.

This colored ooze of matter which flows
along Time's lubricious sluiceways — this
colored ooze of matter which is our universe,
think you it is any the less absurd than
those foundered in incalculable past cycles?
Cause and effect give you proof of rational
ity, you say; but what is the cause of cause
and effect and the effect of cause and
effect? Where is your ultimate? Under the
cowl of Imagination there is the set face
of Fear! You are a phantom no less than
the spectres that stood in the half -lit rooms
of your brain last night when you "slept" —
the sleep of a dreaming.

That brooding vapor which we name
thought sends off these glaring rings of
matter which noose us the better to the mud

THE MASQUERADE 121

and quicksands. The beds of rivers, the
bases of mountains, the roots of trees are
of the imaged vapor that projects its shapes
against the white screen of consciousness.
Upstarts from our own tombs, we etch in
the ghastly spaces that confront us suns
and moons and the constellations of shining
pebbles — and rub them out again.

The fangs of Change fasten on all sub
stances and all things that are born have
as sole dower a windingsheet. We are each
and all of us separate urns filled with il
lusory flame that licks up shadows and that
inter at last only silence.

We are Time's ail and Motion's malady.

To grasp and hold and possess a thing
is the marriage of mockeries, the coition of
shadows. Man is the wastrel of the inutile,
ageless cycles. Call forth from the earth
all that have gone therein and the earth
would turn charnel-house, the very trees
pale into ashy corpses and the waters swim
with depth on depth of phantom faces and
the Himalayas gray to multiplied skull-
towers.

Such are we in these kilns of chance and
change and illusion.

Little lanterns and bell-buoys — nothing

122 THE MASQUERADE

more are our senses ; lanterns and bell buoys
that guide the phantom Ego for a little
while across a phantom, mirage-studded
waste. Performance is the gallows-tree of
Intention, and action is strangled in the
hempen folds of insight.

Persons, things, historical incidents are
the poetics of Change, the scenic properties
in a play that is neither a tragedy nor a
comedy. Rich in its buffoonery, it ap
proaches the farcical or the pantomimic — a
pantomime played in a darkened auditorium
with a mortal coldness blowing out of the
wings.

The spirit that rules life is neither a spirit
of destruction nor a spirit of creation; it is
the Spirit of Evanescence, a lapsing of
shadow into shadow, a fusing and inter
changing, with a perpetual tendency to ex
tinction, for each thing tends to return to
its metaphysical condition. All things are
momentary, even Eternity, which is but a
flitting thought across the blank surfaces
of the Ego, unseizable, unstable; all that
can possibly be is implicated in the transi
tory, confederate to Oblivion.

Pass the whole universe of sense-contact
through the spectrum of the Ego's interior

THE MASQUERADE 123

vision and one has colors and vibrations
only. Here Euclid and Grimm are of equal
importance and they that built the Pyramids
built things as vain and less beautiful than
they who lie under the Aurelian wall.

RESPECTABILITY

NO word cows like Respectability.
We constantly hear those phrases:
"The respectable elements of the
community," "the respectable citizens," "re
spectable people." And we pass dumbly,
hat in hand as though we had entered a
fane dedicated to some high purpose, when
as a matter of fact we are cringing before
a paradise of cowards, the cardboard gate
of which is painted to look like iron.

On the waxed and shining ramparts of
Respectability struts Conformity dressed
like a flunkey. Behind him shambles the
lackey Hypocrisy muffled in gold-leaf.
From behind the walls, from deep within
this Eden of parasites, is blown a sickening
odor. It comes from the live beings im
prisoned within whose souls are without
drainage.

The dominant instinct in "respectable
circles" is fear. The psychology of respect
ability is, thread for thread, link for link,
(124)

RESPECTABILITY 125

the psychology of cowardice. Long genera
tions of "respectable families" have stu
pidity flickering from the eyes and bilious
abjectness a-flutter on the cheek.

Respectability is a survival of the herd
ing instinct of the lower animals. The
plane of initiative, which is distinctively
human, has not been attained. In the great
droves of the respectable — a strange mix
ture of bovine and fox-like instincts — dif
ferentiation has not yet begun. The law
of variation does not apply here. And this
is because in these vast herds there are no
individuals; there is only type. It is true
that they are called by different names, but
this no more signifies individuality than the
branding of numbers on oxen signifies
differences of intelligence.

The evolution of respectability would of
course have to include the evolution of mo
tion and its ramifications from the first
Colorless Conformity, wherein Nothing
was; detailing the metaphysical history of
the first rebellious tremblings in that massed
vacuum — the first spurts of color, the first
sinful hankerings, the first defiance of
immobility of the original sinful atoms.

Some such idea as this, I take it, runs

126 RESPECTABILITY

through the legend of Prometheus, who
rebelled against the deadly-dull philistinism
of the gods and who flung the glove — or,
rather the fennel-rod of fire-anointed
thought — in the face of Olympian respect
ability, with its Sorosis, ennuis and porch
gossip, and who was punished by having
his vitals nibbled for all eternity by the
croaking ravens of the Olympian Status
Quo.

Again we find it in another form in the
war between the hosts of the Lord and
Lucifer, whose quick mind, tinged with the
healthy Byronism of that pre-Byronic age,
conceived that memorable insurrection
against the cataleptic respectability of
Heaven.

Still, again, the legend reappears in
Genesis, where the serpent, brain-full of
knowledge and wisdom, stuck his fangs
deep into the Arcadian respectability of
Eden, shattering not only the complacency
of Adam and Eve but preparing the way
for Cain, whose heel, stuck deep into the
sacrificial offerings of his smugly dutiful
brother, flattened the nose of respectability
and gave to history in himself its first Man.

In the sphere of zoology we are on firmer

RESPECTABILITY 127

ground. In the long run, mammals of the
same species are militantly bourgeois. They
think in droves and instinctively fend them
selves against the incursions of the New.
There are no doubt renegade whales and
baboons with ideas of individualized des
tinies and deers that overstep the calcined
codes of mob-action and who have analyzed
the meaning of the mincing step, the boot
leg glance and the homely fireside virtues
of their companions ; but there is always the
restraint of a depleted larder and a ruffled
skin and Opinion with its condemnations
to divers hells. Variation from the type
is never respectable. A reasonable resilience
is often granted, but, in the long run, it is
fatal not to do as others do. Whinny in
herd-rhythm, snarl to the note of the drove,
let your lowing be according to your sta
tion — something like this we conceive may
be the rules of the sub-human protagonists
of the "respectable elements" of society.
And life is jigged in herd-time and the soul
of the sub-human species lies in its lucent
pickle.

So sub-human respectability streams into
the human, passing over by narrow ways
and mule -trails. As we know them here

128 RESPECTABILITY

they are the sons of God and Home is
God's acre. They worship at the godhead
of Authority, "things said," the embalmed
historic lies. They stand solidly arrayed
against variation from the mass, as do their
four-footed betters. They all have the
courage of rejecting their own convictions.
They sit rigid in their moral tarpaulins.
They make daily pilgrimages to their own
souls, spotless nullities. The Kabala is in
Philadelphia. The Sacred Stone is a nugget.
Pretence is the first virtue among them.
If they post to forbidden sheets, it is done
on some moral hypothesis.

This giant silent conspiracy of mediocrity,
this race-thesaurus of the average, has in
all ages been the sworn enemy of all men
tal and moral progress. Respectability is
the leaden weight in the scale of conserv
atism. It crucified Christ and egged Byron
out of England. It excommunicated Spi
noza and hurried with the fagots that
burned Bruno. It invents anti-vice societies
to shelter its mind against its own porno
graphic instincts. In all history Respect
ability has never given the world a brave
act, a brave thought, a beautiful idea. Food
and sex — they are the axes on which it

RESPECTABILITY 129

turns; for it life is only significant below
the navel.

It is impossible to compute the number
of beings that have been chloroformed in
the House of Respectability. Bribed,
beaten, threatened, the spark of moral or
mental revolt has gone out of thousands
of young minds and they have lived in
those fetid purlieus and died with a chaplet
of the ordained virtues on their brows,
pews paid up to date, the coffin neatly be-
flowered.

At birth handed iron lances to fling at
the sun, they came to cut them up into
darning needles and book-cutters. Found
lings of ideas pregnant with dreams, they
were farmed out to Rote, their dreams pal
ing to ashy fears. Their hands outstretched
toward the open-seas of life, they have felt
in their muscles the palsy of will-lessness
before the croaking cries of the landlubbers
of Respectability. The fine purple coat of
rebellion becomes a seedy house- jacket and
the sandals of fire are exchanged for car
pet-slippers that convey one noiselessly over
the plush conventions. All who enter there
have abandoned themselves.

The temples of Respectability are the

130 RESPECTABILITY

abattoirs of the quick and the catacombs
of the virile.

Respectability is always dragged behind
the Spirit of Age. It is the inveterate
enemy of the innovative spirit. Philistia
ends where ideas begin. What seems to
be growth is really change of environment.
Respectability is the same in all ages. They
are the same people who drove Mary Mag
dalen into the gutter as those who held up
their exquisitely manicured fingertips in
horror at Richard Strauss' "Salome." Re
spectability refused to accept the Coperni-
can theory of the universe until it was
hinted that not to do so would stamp it as
unconventional. It refused to accept Ibsen
as a great seer and poet until it found out
that the seventh-rate literary umpires had
swallowed him.

Nevertheless, the Viking spirit in litera
ture, art and life should bless Respectabil
ity. It is the citadel against whose walls
strong men may try their strength. It is
a brazen hollow image, against whose pas
sionless face warriors may practice their
skill at lance-throwing. It is a proving-
ground for those who go forth.

THE IMPENITENT

TO have the courage of one's trans
gressions — that is heroic. To repent
of one's transgressions — that is mere
ly virtue. All apology contains an element
of baseness. To whom should we abase
ourselves? All men are guilty of the same
meannesses — and he to whom I bring propi
tiatory gifts will give them to some one
whom he has offended. It is the penny that
ever returns. No man ever asked to be
forgiven a wrong whose knees did not
quake. This joint-sag is the atavistic ten
dency to beg for mercy on the knees, a prim
itive obeisance to Strength, the "Peccavi!"
of the lost.

The arch-impenitent awes us by his as
sumption of power; in his fine disdains we
catch gleams of the elemental, the barbaric.
His is the confidence of the predestined;
the aloofness and soul-sufficiency that rely
on Fate, whose will will be done. He is of
the open spaces. Conscience, with its sick-
(131)

132 THE IMPENITENT

room airs, has not yet alchemized the Pro
methean fires in his soul to the poisonous
drool wherewith the terror -hounded forever
water the rank flowers of the past. He who
is without conscience is without weakness —
for conscience is the past trying to live
twice, the frost that chills the seeds of god-
hood in us, the back-water that we hold to
scour our souls when life is at low-tide.
A poet of transcendent overdreams has re
corded the fact that "Conscience does make
cowards of us all" — and he gave us Hamlet
from his hot, subtle brain to prove it.

To trace the evolution of conscience — of
that pathologic still, small voice which man
kind declares tells it when it is doing wrong
— would be to write the history of mankind's
defeated dreams. Anything that man can
accomplish is right. By a trick of thought,
goaded by some stern, masked necessity, he
makes it so. What he has failed in he decrees
"wrong." The race is eternally adjusting
itself to its own weaknesses, which it styles
its virtues. The individual soul is a hell of
lost lusts whose ghosts forever trouble us
with their claims. We seldom stop to ask
whether they have real rights, whether the
fetor of their breath on our pale, anemic

THE IMPENITENT 133

souls is not the poison that our later selves
have breathed into these wondrous, ancient
beasts, whom we have denied in our fear,
but who lie deep-buried in the sands of our
souls, mumbling and drowsing and calcu
lating like the Sphinx.

There is a living soul behind that hand
which in the shadow of the gibbet firmly
waves aside the rose-water consolations of
the priest. The gesture has the sombre
majesty of the Inexorable. Murderer he
may be ten times over — a murderer, like an
adultress, is a legal fiction — still he will not
sully his soul with that last, greatest in
firmity — the cry of the human to the Eter
nal to reverse the iron order and sponge
from time what time was bade do. We
may hurl at the malefactor who is sullen
defiance to the last our fatuous anathemas
with the wonderful syntax, but in secret
we revere his grim amiability in the face of
the Irrevocable. An inflexible necessity
hounds him to the end. He who builded
the house, let Him look to it. The tenant
must take what he finds. And if we for
give him — that is the crowning puerility of
mediocrity. For at bottom "I forgive thee"
means "I no longer fear thee." We never

134 THE IMPENITENT

forgive those who have it still in their power
to harm us. And the patronizing forgive
ness of Eternal Omnipotence, the pat on
the head, to have the dust smilingly flecked
from your coat by the finger of Omni
science — what great soul will submit to that?

Hope is a masked blasphemy — and re
pentance is the mask turned inside out. The
self swells to huge proportions beneath the
introspective eye. The ego, reeling drunk
on its own private lusts — intoxicated by
its very thirst — makes of its desires an end
less tape-measure, which it unreels from the
cradle to the pit; and even upon the brink
of the clay-walled hole, with lean and flesh-
poor fingers, it tries to measure some
phantom, brain-born Beyond. We will
have no destiny but our own, no wide-
circling fate-full laws that have not pro
vided for us, no wind that does not blow
our bark to some haven mapped out in the
chaotic foreworld for the special delectation
and eternal safe-housing of that gilded
granule — the fadeless and indestructible
Me!

There is not enough natural faith in the
world. There is nothing we have doubted
more than the fundamental verities. All

THE IMPENITENT 135

believe that two and two make four until
it comes time to die; then we ask God to
make two and two five — or, please God,
four-and-a-half; and we twist and turn and
try to blarney Him down to four-and-a-
quarter — "just this once, God." This spe
cies of God-baiting is called repentance.
Few have the courage to believe their evil
deeds were predestined, were the outcome
of an endless past, the sewage of great
world-currents. "I am I," cried Magda,
the impenitent and regal — and that fine
challenge was answered by "Come up
Higher, thou!"

Each trivial act is dissolved in a govern
ing law, and all law is noosed in a remote
necessity. Each impulse is compounded
of many impulses, and our faintest thought
trails back to the sun. The very disbelief
in a necessity for all our acts and thoughts
is a matter of necessity. There is a tem
perament that would deny the fatality of
temperament. The author of Job gave us
a peep into the star-chamber where our in
dividual destinies are decided. And Goethe,
who himself smiled from his citadel set on
the other side of good and evil, made Faust
the victim of a conspiracy.

136 THE IMPENITENT

The philosopher of impenitence was the
great Spinoza — Spinoza the remorseless and
the daring. He was the master immoralist
— or non-moralist — and from his spiritual
loins sprang the great psychologist, the
ferret-brained Nietzsche. God created time
and Spinoza destroyed it. For him the
past did not exist — his serene soul moved
from Now to Now. Booted and sandaled,
a Knight of the Open Road, he went forth
in youth to do battle with the most profit
able lie ever concocted — the lie of free-will —
a priestly invention to absolve the Most
High.

Spinoza's God we can pass over. It was
nothing but a formula for ennui — an omni
potent, omnipresent, indestructible stupid
ity. It had no knowledge of good or evil,
but abided in a transcendental state of
total ignorance. It was a sort of spiritual
glue that held all things together.

The days of this lens-grinder were white-
capped negations. From the other side of
life he watched humans playing and dis
sected their emotions. He conceived the
emotions to be a sort of poisonous coil, a
tangle that held man in the mud. For the
tear-besotted sentimentality that is forever

THE IMPENITENT 137

looking back upon an arid past he had that
profound contempt which philosophers
have masked under a brain-smile.

Good and evil are relative terms and
mean nothing to him whose vision extends
beyond the immediate effect of each act.
There is no code that lasts a thousand years.
There is necessity, which is to say no man
can escape himself. His most unlawful
acts are lawful, and in nature there are no
such things as transgressions. Or, rather,
there is nothing else — all is transgression.
Government is an organized transgression.
Its excuse for being is that it can carry on
the cosmic system of vengeance better than
the individual can.

Spinoza was the most cold-blooded anarch
who ever lived and certainly the boldest
moral — or immoral — philosopher. He
crawled out to the eaves of things, peeped
over, and boldly took the leap. He burned
all bridges, cut all bonds, wiped all yester
days from his mental slate, asked for no
philosophic quarter and gave none.

What is evil? he asked. Evil is that which
gives man pain. Not only pain that comes
from external things, but pain that comes
from ourselves is evil. Conscience is evil

138 THE IMPENITENT

because it is the soul preying on itself. It
is a Torquemada invented by sickly souls
who still dwell in the mists of the emotional
foreworld.

Come with me into the beyond-world of
the intellect, of the understanding, and see
yourself and your comic sins as my placid,
immovable, passion-dry God sees you! cried
Spinoza.

"Repentance is not a virtue, nor does it
arise from reason; but he who repents of
an action is doubly wretched and infirm,"
he says calmly in a celebrated proposition.
The original transgression has inflicted pain
on someone; but the act was motived not
in you but in the endless past that stretched
away before your birth and was latent in
the sidereal gases. What can your repent
ance do but add pain to pain, tear to tear,
anguish to anguish? All the waters of
Araby will not wash your damned spots out,
because the waters of Araby cannot inun
date the infinite; and your weaknesses,
which you call your sins, were predestined
in unremembered past durations.

The doctrine of human responsibility is
one that has its uses. Historically, society
is an evolving illusion, and it feeds on lies

THE IMPENITENT 139

like the daughter of Rappacini lived and
thrived on poisons. But there is a finer
virtue than self-condemnation — it is self-
absolution. Penitence is an hysterical
tickle-self. It is like one of those scorching,
belly-burning dishes that degenerate Rome
concocted to stimulate a jaded palate and
a blase maw. "Confession is good for the
soul," it is said — that is, it is pleasurable,
and we invent sins for the pleasure of con
fession and repentance. Like dead flies in
a bowl of curdled cream, so lies the soul
of man in his tear-vats. The lives of men
are an endless expiation, as Emerson, a
crowned god of the Overworld, has said.
The souls of the repentant are great penal
colonies — their days a series of vicarious
atonements.

Each day we should be apostate to a self
is the essence of the teaching of Spinoza.
The progressive evolution of the individual
soul is like the uncoiling of an infinite chain,
each link of which differs from the other.
Some links are dun-colored, some are slime-
corroded, some are of gleaming gold, some
of neutral tints, and some fleece-white. The
slime-smeared link cannot dominate the free
soul. It was forged in hell; let hell look to
its works!

140 THE IMPENITENT

There are two orders of beings; they
whom their devils use and they who
use their devils. Spinoza was Orestes
triumphant.

Goethe was a spiritual Titan who strode
through his own soul and reached an outer
most gate where he signaled back a "Come
hither and see!" to the sickly age in which
he lived. Goethe saw life from so high a
point that his rejection of life and his ac
ceptance of life were the same thing. He
stood where all things merged and com
prehended in a glance the meaninglessness
of any one thing and yet the necessity which
urged all things to disappear in one another.
"Sin," "evil," "pain" were to him fine ex
periences which no great soul should shrink
from; rather should pain be courted for
the residuum of wisdom that lies at the
bottom of it. Does the physician who has
inoculated himself with deadly germs for
the purpose of furthering an intellectual
lust regret his action if the experiment has
yielded him a truth, even though looking
on that truth has condemned him to death ?
So in the spiritual sphere Goethe would
urge us to live our sins half-gayly for the
knowledge they bring, and never to look

THE IMPENITENT 141

back lest we turn to pillars of jelly.

Let him who is perfect and stupid repent,
for he has not yet lived; but he who has
been bludgeoned and has bludgeoned in
turn; who has been taken and given in the
combats where each instinct fights for its
own; who has made of his own life a
shambles and yet peered at himself from
time to time from the little white turret
in the brain-apex — let him rejoice and
repent not. The fox is caught in the gin
and the star is enmeshed in law and the
souls of men are matrixed in their destinies.
The lithe-limbed Goethe swam through the
flotsam and jetsam of his acts and brushed
the slime-matted seaweed from his eyes —
swam to a point where the waters meet the
stars and escaped with Spinoza into the un-
arithmetical spaces.

How fast our sickly pasts would decom
pose and vanish in their poisonous mists did
we not forever keep them alive with our in
verted glances! We lie on the crest of an
on-moving wave, but instead of taking our
bearings from an everlasting height — the
immovable present moment — we glance
down with tear-stained cheeks into the
hollow we believe we just rose from, or

142 THE IMPENITENT

stand wringing our hands in fear of the
hollow we believe we are about to disappear
in.

What is the outcome of our acts? Our
most damnable lies may breed in time's
mighty tangle unforgettable virtues. And
if one could trace back those actions which
make him complacent he would find them
rooted in degradation that would bring the
inerasable pallors to his soul.

The religion of Buddha is founded on
the profoundest cosmic vision that ever il
lumined a human mind. The world is an
expedient, and nothing is or is not but
thinking makes it so. In the view of the
Buddhist, repentance is as idle as rejoicing,
for both spring from the illusion of self —
that transitory agglomeration of millions
of individuals which science calls cells. All
are in the whirl of law; the individual is
bound to a fiery, whirling wheel that one
moment ducks him in mud and the next
moment whirls him to azure vistas. You
are the mud, the azure, the wheel, and the
fiery whirl; you are all but yourself. So
the Buddhist, negativing past, present, top,
bottom, good, evil, here, hereafter, folds his
toga about him and lies down to pleasant
Nirvanas.

THE IMPENITENT 143

Self -consciousness may destroy or create.
The first peep into ourselves terrifies us,
and if we do not succumb to what we see
in that glance into the inferno out of which
we have wriggled we shall live to spurn it,
or better, utilize it. Your soul will in time
become a fine drama — a playhouse with
one silent auditor. You will love your
"sins" for the sake of the climaxes that
their triumph or defeat leads up to. You
will become your own hero, your own
ideal of perfect villainy; and when you
grow tired of the performance you can
enter, through the medium of art, into the
marvellous adventures of other men's souls,
for all lofty minds at last dramatize or sing
themselves in some form. Emerson's essays
are the chronicle of his spiritual escapades,
Ibsen's plays are his jungle-story, Chopin
set himself to music, and Balzac explored
himself and made of truth a gorgeous fic
tion.

St. Augustine, who was so black that he
turned white, and who, like Tolstoi, mistook
impotency for self-mastery, says that we
may rise on our dead selves to higher things.
Rather may we rise on our live selves to
higher things. The past is dead only in

144 THE IMPENITENT

the sense that it never existed. Walt
Whitman sang of himself in his entirety —
"denying nothing." He was always just
ahead of himself. Nature, he saw, had no
penitential days; she was ruthless and
blithe, possessed something of a naive cun
ning, used compost and lily-pollen in her
laboratories, made poems of her rain-days
and fair days — and nothing was ever amiss.
Both Emerson and Whitman recognized
evil, but refused to admit the idea of sin
into their conception of things. They lived,
like Spinoza and Goethe, in the overspaces
and were never troubled by that form of
spiritual dyspepsia which comes from over
eating at the tables of the past.

Friedrich Nietzsche saw in conscience
the greatest evil that the brooding mind of
man had ever raised up. The great rhap
sodical psychologist, who flung down in
passionate hate the gage of battle to the
other-world roisterers, saw to the bottom
of that pit of slime, the soul of man. Those
who had lusted and failed of their lusts
had spawned conscience, which begat guilt,
which begat sin, which begat emaciation,
penitence and heaven-hunger, which begat
another world, where the strong men cease

THE IMPENITENT 145

from taking and the eunuchs get the best.
The weak, the tear-stained, the neurotic,
the diseased build and build, and into their
earth-palaces they enter not, so they have
conspired to overthrow the palaces that
have been erected by their masters, the
strong, the unrelenting, the never-regret
ting, the impenitents. And they have made
of their weaknesses virtues and put craft
and cunning into the seat of power and
made idols of pillars of salt. The vengeful
eyes of the lost flash from behind their
masks of love, and the knotted veins of
cruelty are concealed by a crown of thorns.
There is no motive power in regrets —
that way lies death — or, worse, the jealous
rage that begets him who loves his fellow-
man too much and himself not at all. Self-
love is the condition of all love: the bud
must flower before it can seed; the sun
is the sun to its last outpost of flame. The
impenitent is himself to his last act; he
presages a new series, where evolution and
devolution are one; where there is neither
growth nor decay, but an eternal transition,
a rising from equilibrium to equilibrium,
from infinite sweep to infinite sweep.

THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE

THE mystery t)f surfaces, the delight
of touch, the joy bred of the mel
odies of motion, the ecstasy of con
tact with ideas that germinate newer per
spectives and that pullulate with reminis
cences that wear over their faces the purple
veils of fantasy, mutilated memorabilia of
ante-natal experiences — and all these things
unallied to any idea of responsibility, mun
dane or super-mundane; just life for life's
sake; the adventure of the mind in matter;
the adventure of the senses in air and water
and sunlight and rain; to sack the minutes
of their possibilities; to privateer against
the day of death; to skirt the coasts of
strange lands built of those moods that arise
in the brain just before waking time;
plagiarizing no rules and making none;
foraging on all men's thoughts; smuggling
through the cellars of the sub-conscious the
gold and silver of daily experience, to be
wrought to unfamiliar shapes in those dark-
(146)

THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 147

ened smithies; to gut life, to maraud on the
farthest borders of the conceivable, and to
stand accoutred at the tomb with the loot
of all this world prepared for another ap
prenticeship in consciousness: Such is the
passionate purpose of the pagan.

The miraculous does not happen; the
miraculous is. The pagan attitude is the
attitude of wonder, amazement, childish
delight. Matter is haunted. Winter is
haunted with the ghost of a spring. With
ered branches with the ice glittering upon
them hold latent within them the perfumed
rose. The atom is a tiny house with many
ghosts. Sunlight on my shoe is inexpli
cable. Aye, this sunlight is haunted — else
how came this world? All science is classi
fied folklore. Government by pixies is not
one jot inferior to government by earth
quake, fire, famine and evolving sidereal
extinction.

So the pagan stands swathed in the sense
of elemental mystery, translating all things
back to their private, original glamour, and
with the witchcraft of his holy innocence —
which contains much of the riant diablerie
of adolescence — unwinding the cords of
complexity that man has wound round and

148 THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE

round the omnipotent Ghost that permeates
all things.

By the mechanism of association of ideas
we generally ally the word paganism with
the words Ancient Greece. But that ad
mirable flowering of the human spirit, those
few centuries wherein Mind and Matter
played the unrepentant prodigal with their
own native inheritances, was no isolated
phenomenon. Paganism is the instinct for
liberty. It is a tendency, not a bundle of
opinions.

A pagan movement is always a "new
movement." It is always a rebellion against
dogma, codes, conventions, systems; it is
the deep procreant spirit that wages war
against all forms of stupidity. It is the im
mortal red bud that miraculously, age after
age, in literature, art and thought, bursts
through the leaden strata of custom; the
sword whetted with light that cuts the
thongs of familiarity that are twisted round
and round the living, palpitant soul of man.

There is always a renaissance somewhere
in the world. The human spirit will not
long be set in limits. It will suffer, but
it will not rest. The pagan spirit comes
to stir the dead, to blast the sight with its

THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 149

supernal vistas or to twist us to frenetic
maenads with its sudden inundation of
Beauty. It may be the sudden epiphany
of a Nietzsche in philosophy, a murderous
force that burns up everything in its trail,
including itself, after having set in flames
the rotting ramparts of the orthodox gods.

Or it may be the quiet intrusion in life
of a Walter Pater, who wove with the
golden thread of antique dreams that great
arras curtain that holds in the irrevocable
quiescence of its web the stories of the
spiritual wayfaring of Marius, Denis
L'Auxerrois, Sebastian Van Storck and
Florian Deleal; — Pater who was the renais
sance of the Renaissance.

Or it may be the unannounced recurrence
of a Pierre Louys, whose "Songs of Bilitis"
conjugate the things seen with the eye and
the things touched of the body in all their
moods, tenses and inflections. With the
language of babes he transfigures and re
juvenates a staled world. The wonder of
trees, of lakes, of human nudity, of the
simplest emotions assaults us like a reproach
after turning these pages. The bellied,
sun-flecked sail of the ship that lurches
high-low in Mitylene waters, the singing of

150 THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE

rain-drops on the surfaces of pools set in a
sombre woods, the music of lovers' steps
as they walk to the tryst — simple, immortal
things, with not a trace of moral millinery
about them nor the rouged smirk of guilt.

William Sharpe was of those who pro
claimed the Golden Year. In "Vistas" there
is a Pere Hilarion who forsakes his cowl
and girdle at the call of love, and, ripping
the Crucified from the Cross that stands
on the shore of the waters that divide Yea-
land from Nay-land, he flings it angrily
into the current and plunges to the other
shore — Yea-land — with the woman he loves.
They vanish in the dawn. The same motive
recurs in "Cathal of the Woods." A young
priest is buried alive in a tree for breaking
his vows. He loved a King's daughter.
But from the tree the soul of Cathal
prophesies the doom of the preachers of the
new faith, the disciples of the White God
of Galilee. Of the priest who decreed his
tree-death Cathal sings: —

"Flame burn him in heart of flame, and
may he wane as wax at the furnace,

And his soul drown in tears, and his body
be a nothingness upon the sands."

Cathal becomes a tree-man and finds his

THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 151

sweetheart, a tree-woman, and they become
as immortal as Nature, spurning the
ephemeral Gods of nations and their sapless
priests.

And through the familiar labyrinths of
life it is thus that some human revenant of
the usurped gods always comes to pour his
libations of joy, to jettison his fulness, to
spill into the golden matrices of art this
Hyperborean postlude.

If the erotic Sappho was a pagan, so
was the austere Epicurus. In our day Renan
and Anatole France, Goethe and Keats,
Swinburne and D'Annunzio were pagans.
Rabelais and Montaigne left records that
smug gentility has not yet found the means
of annulling. The spirit of scepticism is
essentially pagan. Dogma and morals orb
in the same beaten track. Both are pa
rochial. There is a chance that man, evolv
ing toward superterrestrial spheres, may
stumble across the skirts of Truth some
day; but he can never do it in the company
of Dogma or Morals.

Paganism, on its intellectual side, is the
spirit of receptivity. It feels all things and
knows nothing, smiles and fingers with a
pitying touch the shuttle of Destiny

152 THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE

which weaves such calamitous issues.

For what one thinks signifies little; but
the manner in which one thinks reveals
one's affinities. Individuality does not lie
in our thought, but the way we characterize
thought. There are no new messages for
the world; there are only new messengers
from old principalities; new eyes that re
read the old parchments. The manner in
which one feels a thought, that consecrates
him.

Paganism is attitude.

The psychical root of paganism is feel
ing. Its test-tubes are pleasure and pain.
Its metaphysic is the eternality of the pres
ent moment. Life is its own excuse and
pleasurable feelings — mental and physical —
are the anthemings of the glad gods on the
keyboard of nerves. Religion is fatigue.
To be "saved" for another world is to be
"lost" to this — the adventurer grown tired,
Siegfried hesitating before the rampart of
flame, Prometheus recanting, Man the Vik
ing on the seas of sound, color and menac
ing wave turned parish beadle.

And the "ethic" of the pagan impulse?
It is this: Squander yourself on the winds,
but be not blindly blown along with them.

THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 153

Be the heart of the blast. Absolute sub
mission to life is absolute mastery of life.

The emptiness of that word "progress"!
All life, the evolutionary process, tends to
dissonance, complexity. Differentiation in
itself is estrangement from the common
World-Root; and as we go to seek the
Great Harmony it recedes before us. Circle
emerges from circle, and the last circle is
only the last illusive horizon. Each single
thing holds the sought secret, but we spurn
it. Science sees only in it a link in a chain.
Each minute is only part of an hour, the
disciples of method and system will tell us,
when in reality the hour is the essence, the
very heart of the minute. Pluck the minute
in its entirety, and the secret of the hour —
of all hours — is yours.

The pagan spirit can never die. It is it
self the instinct to live, it is the eternal
knocker at the door of the House of Cir
cumstance, the Voice that calls in all cen
turies to the pursuit of Beauty. It is the
spirit of revolt in art and thought. It is the
cloven flame that consumes age after age
the citadels of authority and their comman
ders sheathed cap-a-pie in their ethical
petticoats.

SILENCE

THEY who are won to silence have
passed the gaudy gates of Vanity
Fair — the gates that open outward
to the Purple Hills of Dreams. They have
famished 'mid plenty and roistered with
sick heart, and the noises they brewed and
the beautiful dreams they spilled on the
dusty highways and the soft lies their eyes
have told are no more. For them the reign
of the Real has begun. In silence they
hear — and their souls are the noiseless foot
falls of the Eternal.

Caked in those whispering south winds,
burnished by those eternal suns that warm
without scorching, swaddled in those white
wrappings, gulfed thus in the immur-
murous — they are the supreme critics of
life. Before the tribunals of taciturnity the
strident is rapped to order, and the gilded
gabbler of the portico is sentenced to wear
the motley and caper with fishwomen.
With shout and laughter we garnish the
(154)

SILENCE 155

days; but Sorrow comes with finger lifted
to her puckered lip, and we are silent; or
if we cry aloud it is where no one can hear.

Each action contains the germ of a des
tiny; each action is a distinct individual in
embryo; and if we had a finer spiritual
organ we should find in these great silences
of the soul destinies and embryos and veiled
Fates in myriad procession. The best of
us, as we are, immured in our limitations,
deafened by bodily hearing and blinded by
bodily eyesight, can hear them, sometimes,
scratching their messages on the walls of
our being as they pass by.

I see a huge crowd pacing the boulevards
at midnight. Fanfare, pell-mell, cackle —
eyes that rove from point to point in anxious
quest of Pleasure; fruitless pacings to and
fro, inutile phrases whispered to gold-sodden,
paunchy disciples of "sociability" by papier
mache women — each soul in reality yawn
ing at each other. I see also a narrow
room on the top floor of a house shrouded
in silence. A youth holds Shelley's poems
in his hand. "Swiftly walk over the western
wave, Spirit of Night"— he has begun that
exquisite invocation written by the Boy of
Spezia Bay. With half-closed eyes he

156 SILENCE

treads with Shelley the western wave and
is afloat in the Spirit of Night, and he has
heard more than all the mottled mobs of
the boulevard, for he listens, while the mobs
can only hear.

To be mewed in marmoreal silences, to
fall with sated visage and cloyed tongue
and a self, hewn to a million diversities,
upon this downy bed canopied and cur
tained with gauzes and textures of strange
patterns; to hear the uproar, tragic in its
inutility, inutile in its tragedy, dwindle to
a world-buzz, then cease entirely — that is
to feel the rapture of calm, the ecstasy of
conscious surcease, a passionate peace.

There are an awe, a wonder, a sheen of
the ethereal in all fine silences. We here
breathe upon the adamantine — and the
adamantine is not; we give ourselves to
float upon a far-winding stream tinct with
ancient sunlights — a bubble drifting upon
a greater bubble, blown from pipes greater
than Pan's. On these stilled waters we
may be immersed without fear of drowning.
It is immersion without submersion, reality
without illusion — and we are hidden, yet
seen of all.

Hamlet's silences are the most impressive

SILENCE 157

parts of the play; in his soliloquies we rec
ognize the soul of the troubled Dane. The
Fates that lure him to the catastrophe
evolve their deviltries in silence. The secret
of the tragedy is spoken by no mouth; it
is a Presence unseen, unheard, but not un-
felt by that inner nerve that responds to
the Idea in which the muddied action of
the play is cradled.

And with what subtle, silent motions do
the Fates weave their filaments of adamant
around the trusting Othello — damned by
a fine virtue, undone by his own nature,
discovered, routed and bludgeoned to earth
by an ingrained optimistic faith in the good
ness of mankind! lago is the fiend par
excellence of dramatic literature. He is
the quiet, grim architect of a most magni
ficent palace of pain. His sense of touch
is exquisite. His building is a destroying.
And yet in nothing that he says, in nothing
that is heard, do we discover the depths
of his extremest infamy. It is left to si
lence — to the imagination. It is Othello
who goes out in utter spiritual darkness;
and though lago is gyved, he stands tri
umphant — and silent. In that silence of
lago in the bedroom of Desdemona the

158 SILENCE

Eumenides have paused to survey their
work. I ago was only their instrument.

In those deep recesses of our being where
the ashes of our dreams lie inurned in their
bronzed, time-worn receptacles; in those
caverns of the undersoul, where our pro
jected but abrogated selves murmur against
the decree that has sentenced them to those
barren wombs; in all that past that is not,
yet is everlastingly, we recognize something
of the inarticulate, something that may not
be uttered even by the heart to the brain.

Ecstasy is mute. Shadows curl around
"I Will," and acts are the undoing of
dreams. "I Will Not" is bred of the higher
view. If it is cold at the poles of ultimate
negation, it is so only in spiritual prospect.
When one has fought his way there he has
cast his laprobes of illusions behind. The
sense of opposites is lost. There is neither
cold nor heat on those silent promontories;
there is placidity, the urgency to rest. The
calm of a half -humorous disdain bathes us.
The soul is then a rendezvous for shadows;
the mind the Rialto of the dead. Postpone
ments are postponed — and it is on the con
dition of perpetual silence that Eternity
has made her assignation with Time.

SILENCE 159

Thought laps us all about and we are
hemmed in by dreams. Speech and act
at best are but a stammering. Our confes
sions to each other are mere stutter. The
finest revelations are made to ourselves.
Who has never paid a pilgrimage unto him
self has never touched the Kabala. The
Mecca of motion is Oblivion.

Elate youth darts upon Life and with
rough hand and strident voice seizes his
tinselled trophies. He takes the universe
for his 'scutcheon, and by the divine right
of vascular palpitation he claims the circling
worlds. Blatant youth! where dost thou
run — or, rather, where runnest thou not?
In mid-life his cries have withered to a
whine and our Don Quixote has dwindled
to a vinegary critic. His elder age is a
discreet silence.

Old age should hold its tongue. Like the
walls of old houses, it has secrets to tell.

There is no soul born to flesh-woof that
has not on a day heard the drumbeat of
retreat sounded in its ears. We have fought
and wept, replied and defied, but in the
Unconscious our genius is chiselling the
Hour — that fateful hour that shall put
clamps upon our affirmations and sew up

160 SILENCE

our lips with the golden threads of taci
turnity. Our scale of life-values has been
wrong. The battles we have fought have
only served to cloud our brains with the
dust of combat. We see we have been
trying to measure Eternity by minutes;
thenceforth we shall eternize minutes. We
smile — and take the veil.

In silence there is universality. Lonely
souls seek the solitudes of nature because
it is there the dreams of spiritual liberty
come true. In these fastnesses are creatures
disburdened of trammels. Winged and
crawling things empty their souls of im
pulse as they list. In the wilderness desire
and attainment are one. The spirit soaked
in these silences participates in the wild
riot of life — riot without uproar; revels
that are mum; endless muffled motion. The
soul passes into all living things. The
silent observer becomes the spirit of the
place, and his meditations are spun into the
crannies of shadows and the crevices of un-
apprehended worlds.

Here man regains his lost kingdom and
sits proudly throned on Self. He feels
himself at the very core of Being, flush
with every conceivable future. He is

SILENCE 161

welded into a One. What has been is
jettisoned; what is to come is unvisored.
It is Nirvana without annihilation. The
squirrel that darts up the tree carries a
human soul with it, and the bird that flies
overhead is chanting a finer song than it
knows, for it warbles for two. The forest
dreamer rides on the crest of a fiery cloud;
and the slime on the tarn — that is he, too.
The individual is blotted out, and the mys
tery of the One-in-Many — thenceforth it
is no mystery.

This is the only liberty man can ever
attain, and the path lies through silence.
Each must go his own way. There is a
supreme release for each, but two cannot
find it together. The unthwarted will,
equilibration, quiescence, the suffusion of
dateless days — would these be yours? Then
rivet yourself to the silences, put your ear
to the dark shell of Night, and fly the
hubbub.

Man is a phenomenal fragment, a tem
poral circumstance, a momentary coagula
tion of debris on the infinite stream of
Being. His personality is dispersed in
death and meditation. In the vast upper
silences the infantile I of daily blab fades

162 SILENCE

like the shadow of a dream. The whole
universe of things lies stretched before us
like islets in an ocean. The radiating
streams of Time flow back to their sources
and drag with them the bubble ages.

Like a Greek naked and sweaty from the
games who plunges into a cooling stream,
so we, sweaty and distraught, fresh from
the satanic saturnalias of action, may
plunge into the lustral calms, the healing
silences — and forget.

POSTERITY: THE NEW
SUPERSTITION

THE latest decoy set up by the inde
structible god of illusions is Poster
ity. Man has been invited to live for
various motives. Once it was for the glory
of God. Comte proposed as a motive the
glory of man. Now we are invited to live
for the glory of Posterity. Nietzsche called
Posterity the Overman; socialists call it
"the rising generation."

No one has thought of the glory of liv
ing for the sake of living, of eating, fight
ing, reproducing merely because they give
pleasure. Always there are devil-gods that
call for sacrifices ; always there is the bogey-
word that demands obeisance and tribute
of all our actions. Nothing must be allowed
to exist for itself. Each thing must exist
for the sake of some other thing. The per
fume in a rose is only legitimate if there
is a human nostril somewhere to be intox
icated; and the perfume of our acts and
(163)

164 POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION

thoughts is only a "moral" or a * 'right"
perfume if it gives pleasure to the nostrils
of God, Church, the Common Good, or
Posterity.

Man has not yet become a good animal.
He suffers from ideals, as he once suffered
from superstitions. An ideal is a super
stition in court clothes. It makes very little
difference whether you believe that an east-
wind blowing down the chimney on a moon
light night will bring you good luck or that
an act that gives you pleasure in the doing
is "right" if it benefits Posterity and wrong
if it doesn't.

The East worships its ancestors ; the West
worships Posterity. The East lies prone
on its belly offering tributes to ghosts;
the West bows its head in adoration to the
ghosts not yet born. When an Oriental
worships the soul of a bit of wood we call
him superstitious; when the Westerner
worships certain letters of his alphabet
which spell "God" or "Church" or "Moral
ity" or "Posterity" we call it the Ideal.

And a smile steals over the brow of Puck
and Momus reels in glee.

Ancestor-worship is the old superstition;
posterity-worship the new superstition. The

POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 165

old bottles are filled with the new wine,
but the old labels have never been taken off.
We still march under mottoes and tramp
to Ultima Thule to the raging tom-toms
beaten by priests and idealists. Still we
signal a host of imaginary beings with the
gaudily colored pocket-handkerchiefs of
our latest trumpery abstraction.

All these words that man bows before
one after another in his flight across the
face of Time are born of the idea of Re
sponsibility, that somewhere there is Some
thing that is taking cognizance of all his
acts and will bring him to account for them.
Sometimes it is the bearded, concrete
Jehovah of the Jews; now it happens to be
a beardless, visageless, vaguely shadowed
Posterity. The idea of responsibility is as
universal as all other illusions — the uni
versality of an idea or instinct merely proves
its universality. From the feeling of re
sponsibility sprung the most immoral and
strength-destroying doctrine that we know
of — the doctrine of the Vicarious Atone
ment.

Responsibility to God was the first great
necessary lie — for if the race is to be pre
served (no one has ever found a rational

166 POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION

reason why it should be) lies are more nec
essary to its growth and sustenance than
truths. Responsibility to God — or gods —
was the first ideal, the birth-boards that
clamped and twisted the brain and soul of
healthy self-centred beings and changed
their centres of gravity from the enkernelled
Self to an all-seeing, all-recording Nonentity
that had a name but no local habitation.

Man is born in his own incalculable ante
rior images, but he came to believe in his
all-ignorance that he had been created in
the image of another, a giant jail-warden
who allowed him to rove the earth at his
pleasure under a heavy bail-bond to keep
the peace. The idea of an eternal responsi
bility to this abstraction germinated the
first seeds of man's moral weakness, para
lyzed his activities, sickened him with
scrupulosities and filled him with the con
sciousness that healthy activity was sin.
War began within him, a war between his
superb irresponsible instincts and the idea
of a vicarious responsibility, and out of
that shambles issued the whining Christian,
the lord of tatters called the Idealist, and
that mincing prig, Conscience.

The idea of responsibility to God began

POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 167

to wane with the dawning suspicion that
man was not a celestial but a sociological
animal. Conceiving himself to be this new
thing, he now invented a new kind of re
sponsibility called "social responsibility."
The old mask was being repainted. The
phrase "social well-being" was hoisted into
the Ark of the Covenant of Lies. An act
was now good or bad as it affected the com
munity. Man loved his neighbor for the
responsibilities he could shoulder on him;
the corner ballot box was the Kabala; the
community had power to bless or curse the
individual. God had become a town-hall
orator; the Recording-Angel had become
a court -reporter. The era of the State-Lie
had begun.

The transition is easy from the cant about
living for the sake of "doing good in the
community" and "benefiting the whole"
to the ideal of living for the sake of poster
ity. The old obscure doctrine of blood sacri
fice reappears in this new posterity super
stition, slightly attenuated and shorn of
its immediate and more obvious savage
characteristics ; but the old trail of responsi
bility and life-guilt is there.

We are told to live for the sake of pos-

168 POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION

terity, we must breed for posterity, eat for
the sake of posterity, be moral for the sake
of posterity, dress hygienically for the sake
of posterity, and even die when necessary
for the sake of posterity. We legislate for
posterity, rear a child with an eye to pos
terity, tinker with the social system for the
sake of posterity, tamper with individual
liberty for the sake of posterity, construct
Utopias for the sake of posterity, vote the
socialist ticket for the sake of posterity.

It is the fetich, the Moloch, the Golden
Calf of our civilization. We who are liv
ing, palpitating in the flesh and blood pres
ent have no rights; the ego is not sufficient
unto itself; we are only straws to show
which way the sociological and evolutionary
winds are blowing; we are only the bricks
and mortar that shall go to build the mar
vellous, fantastic, phantasmal edifice to
house that coming Holy Family — Posterity.
Our deeds have no value unless they feed
the bulging belly of incalculable non-exist
ent tomorrows. We are only as scraps of
bone and meat tossed to that fugitive glut
ton, the Future, by pasty-souled Idealists
and the spineless altruists who poison life
with their doctrines of responsibility and

POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 169

hoax the feminine with their metaphysical
Cardiff Giants.

We are to be systematized, badged, classed,
grooved, wired, stuffed. Our instincts, our
very marrow, are to be inoculated by the
virus of altruism and our faces beatified
with the forerunning rays of tjie great
Posterity Light. How we are to glow with
the shine of "right living" — all because the
altruistic quacks with their obsessions of
Succubas and Incubae have dreamed a new
dream which they call Posterity!

Weak, impotent, helpless before the im
movable present, man salves his sore spot
with hopes for the future. Not being able
to regulate his life today, he promises him
self a virtuous, vicarious tomorrow. Not
daring to set up his Ego as God and its end
less pleasure as sufficient motive for all his
acts, he sets up an Alter Ego and calls it
Posterity, as he once called it God, then
the State or the Community.

With ecstatic eye and lolling, anticipatory
tongue he awaits for his happiness in Pos
terity — something no one has ever seen,
something no one can define, something
that could not possibly exist.

AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE

THERE are those who will look up
at that great round clock without
a circumference called the Universe
with its two hands — Time and Space — of
infinite length and pretend to tell you the
exact time!

The older we grow the less we know. As
the years roll over us we become more dog
matic about the few things we do know, and
it is this dogmatism that is mistaken for
wisdom, just as a deep, matured voice is
often mistaken for brains.

The fruit of all knowledge is not know
ing, but doubt. If we will one single ac
tion long enough its contrary will be born.
A truth will not bear prolonged study.
First it begins to look ridiculous; then it
disappears into something else. Knowledge
seekers are wave-chasers.

The believer is allowed his little illusion.
He is a comic shape. He is set in limits,
mortised in his mania, specialized, forever
(170)

AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 171

mummified. God and the Devil both smile
at him indulgently. But the unbeliever —
the Seeker prowling across the Eternities,
the Wanderer who rejects and passes on —
is the tragic shape at which neither God
nor the Devil laughs. They know that if
in some unimaginably remote being-shape
this unbeliever should happen on the thing
he seeks both Valhalla and Nibelheim will
crumble. The little comic shape prinked
out in his cock-surety goes straight to
heaven when he dies — and so ends. But the
other lives in hell here and hereafter. And
that's why the Twin Powers never smile.
We know that the character of our
dreams when asleep is wholly determined
by certain subjective conditions — that they
are frightful, beautiful, obscure as certain
organs of the body are affected. In the same
way the whole external universe — with its
endless moving panorama of trees, stars,
animals, our own bodies — is determined
for us by subjective conditions. The uni
formity of nature is nothing but uniformity
of brain-structure. The external world is
a dream — more coherent, it is true, than the
brain-pictures of the night — but the coher
ence is a matter of degree only, for the laws

172 AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE

of coherence are rooted in the mind.

Could we stand at the core of things we
should see no difference in kind between
that vision of height, solidity and sublimity
which when standing at its base at high
noon we call Mont Blanc and the vision of
Mont Blanc in sleep. We transfer to the
senses what properly belongs in conscious
ness. The perfume of a flower is not in the
olfactory nerves, but in the brain. Per
fume is a form of consciousness ; so are light
and heat. The proof of this is in the fact
that anaesthetics abolish for us the whole
universe, while stimulants that fire the brain
heighten our consciousness of it. Dreams
are nothing but blood stimulation — brain-
expansion — and the universe of motion and
matter exists under the scalp.

Thus to adjust ourselves properly to the
amazing fugacity of things we must re
main sceptics. The intellect at least should
be sceptic; emotion should build itself
some great object of faith — even if it be
but faith in the grandeur of the sceptical
intellect.

Opinion is Pride and Prejudice scrawling
their justification on the walls of the brain.

If you stare at a truth too long it will

AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 173

become an error. We should blink continu
ally. Truth is not a thing, but an aspect.
You must catch it off guard by continually
playing 'possum.

Life evaporates when we attempt to seize
it. What is the tangible if not a state of
consciousness ?

The survival of an idea — religious, philo
sophical, ethical — one that survives age
after age through infinite changes and vicis
situdes, may prove that idea to be a uni
versal truth or may prove that the soil in
which that idea has grown is incapable of
improvement. Damp cellars will always
produce fungus — and damp cellars are im
mortal things. What is fit survives; what
ever serves is true ; but fitness is antithetical
to universality, and that which serves can
never be the Absolute. So the longest
surviving truth has nothing in common
with the Truth.

The sublime and the ridiculous adhere
in the same object. They are mental states,
points of view — not different things. The
action that at twenty we thought sublime,
at sixty, with deeper insight, has become
ridiculous. An inhabitant of the moon
could see nothing sublime in its aspect. To

174 AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE

sacrifice our life for another is ridiculous
from nature's point of view, for nature
knows nothing of individuals. "What differ
ence does anything make?" asks the cynic,
thus turning all things into objects of ridi
cule. Still, the question is sublime!

The desire to do good is the source of
all the evil in the world. In attempting
to better our condition we add to the com
plexity of things. Like a man caught in
a soft bog, the more frantic his efforts to
extricate himself the deeper he sinks. In
the eye of nature a good impulse is merely
so much force which, coming into contact
with another force, may generate a third
force that will cause more pain than the
original "good" force sought to suppress.

A pessimist is a man who sees life as it
is. To present any aspect of life as it is in
itself through the medium of art — that is,
with the highest degree of impersonality
that a mind still in the flesh can attain —
is necessarily to have one's self stamped
a pessimist. Hence, the disinterested seeker
after truth is always the pessimist, the
alarmist, the iconoclast. The optimist is
never concerned with truth, or things in
themselves — he is only concerned with the

AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 175

status quo and its preservation. He is a
chubby soul with visions, or a lean soul
who is a victim of monomania. An ele
mental truth is always a painful one be
cause the bases of the world are a hunger
of some sort.

Ibsen's stark souls who stand shivering
in the rush of inexorable forces, Nietzsche's
pitiless psychology, gnawing with ravenous
tooth at the rotten timbers of civilization;
Gorky's perfet incisions, De Maupassant's
fine ironic gesture — all these strike terror
to parochial souls. But to tell the truth
about things is not necessarily to be a pes
simist. Every increment of power is an in
crement of life. To know the elemental
truths and to stand calmly by the world's
stink-pots, to watch with calm, unimpas-
sioned eye and record with calm, unimpas-
sioned pen or brush the workings of our
futile passions react upon our souls and
tonic us for battle. The man who looks
under the lids of the world gains in mental
ruggedness what he loses in color.

For a man to see life as it really is he
should spend a year in a madhouse, a year
in a hospital, a year in a jail, and a year in a
tomb. In the madhouse he will come to

176 AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE

understand practical life, in a hospital he
will see the soul of man as it slowly turns
and writhes on its bed of needles, in the jail
he will come to comprehend the meaning of
universal necessity and catch upon his ear
the wail from the depths of things, in the
tomb he will meet Change the Comedian.

Then he will be prepared to think.

Mankind are like flies that have settled
on a giant Gymnast. His novel feats we
call the miraculous; his habitual contor
tions we call Law.

And then so glibly men speak of growth!
Endless growth is an eternal and simul
taneous advance of each 4esire toward every
point of a circle that widens to infinity.
That is the irony of all movement.

Universal unhappiness is caused by the
inability of infinite appetite to subsist on a
finite number of crumbs.

The life-happiness (or unhappiness) of
the individual is a purely arithmetical prob
lem. Each one of us could work the problem
out to his entire satisfaction — that is, if he
knew the kind of multiplication table the
Unknowable is using.

There is a cold so intense that we come
to believe it is warmth. There is a terror

AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 177

that numbs. Sharp pain, by causing us to
swoon, abolishes pain. There are truths
so great that if presented to us suddenly
we instantly recognize them as delusions.
There are such tragic possibilities in our
each act that if pondered over long enough
they will evoke a smile. Thus do all things
pass into one other; opposites turn out to
be aspects, and aspects the relations of x
to x.

Philosophical scepticism — Pyrrhonism —
is the tendency of the mind to ubiquity. The
finest minds are attracted to every point in
the Circle — they are the arch-susceptibles.
The greatest mind sees all things from all
standpoints in one single act of intuition —
it feels a propulsion from its every center
to every conceivable other center.

Why should I go ghost hunting, for who
has explained man? Where is there a
haunted house that can compare with this
universe before me?

Where are there rappings and creakings
such as I hear around me here in this
strange place of mind and matter — and
earth and sea? Where are there more won
derful apparitions than these billions and
billions of ghosts of flesh and force called

178 AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE

men and women that have risen from this
eternal, immeasurable Desire in things?
What sudden translation and disappearance
more unaccountable or monstrous than this
lapse into death? This is the Haunted
House of Life in which we move around,
and each single being is but a wraith above
his own grave.

Sanity is the completest view of the com-
pletest mind, an instantaneous vision of
each thing from all possible sides. Com
plete sanity makes for the negative attitude
toward life, just as the concentration of a
mind on a single idea to the exclusion of
all other ideas tends to narrowness, mono
mania, insanity. All positive men are pas
sionate men because they are not developed
mentally. The Indian yogis, Pyrrho, Mon
taigne were the sanest of men. Beware
of knowing only one thing and knowing it
well. In its limits the rabbit is master of
the thing it knows best.

We speak about "the great crises of his
tory,'* which are purely imaginary crises.
Time works her really great changes si
lently, is her own critic, and records nothing
of importance. Sleep is crisis, waking is
crisis; each turns on its own pivot, and the

AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 179

great things are no matter, and history is
the chronicle of sleepwalkers. Only Illusion
is eternal.

Victory is always disastrous. It is the
moment of disillusion.

Nature is not a series of Laws. Nature
is infinite readjustment. An eternal Law
is only an adjustment that has lasted a
long while.

Irony is an acid pity, the despair of the
brain, an iron mask that impotent tender
ness sometimes puts on to seem the bravo.

Looking forward at twenty we say, "We
are Destiny." Looking backward at sixty
we say, "We have been Destiny's work."
That illusion of twenty was the most im
portant part of her work. Destiny we may
never know; but we may know her masks.
As force she masks as Free-Will, as Evil
she masks as Goodness. She is Necessity
dominoed as Pride.

To look on the trees and the sunlight a
little while, to read a sage or two, to medi
tate and wonder at that which is forever
vanishing, to sleep upon her breasts a night
or two — then quietly to slip away, still
young, still swollen with unbirthed desires:
that is to taste life, that is to know all.

THE TRAIL OF THE WORM

THE human ego is an organ with a
hundred pipes and one stop — Death.
Life is Death's dream. Our nature
is rooted in the Unconscious, and our life
is but a little waking from that eternal
swoon. The brain is never anything but
the organ of dreams, and our body with
its endless anatomical subdivisions is
nothing but a huge tentacle of a Shadow.

Do men come back from the tomb? Aye,
for the Unconscious is a tomb and all of
us who breathe move and dream now —
all who say they are — are merely reappear
ances, uneasy shapes moving across the
blurred vision of the Great Syncopated
God.

The irony of life! the irony of death!
For only the dead are satisfied, and they
would not be satisfied if they were conscious
of their satisfaction. In that midnight of
silence they dream not, and never comes
to them the bitter ecstasies.
(180)

THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 181

The irony of birth I the birth of a child
is the triumph of death. At the moment a
new being comes into the world a grave
somewhere stands empty.

The day is a bitter almond; the night a
vision of falsehoods — and the bitter truths
of open-eyed sentiency and the fantastic
jigging in the brain we call our dreams are
alike fictions, solved and drowned all at
last in that grotesque reality — Death.

Indeed, has not Hegel said that to live is
a kind of blasphemy?

The one fact is Pain; all other facts are
factors. The great central soul of things
temporal is an unquenchable Pain, and the
great central soul of things extra-temporal
is a supreme indifference. Pain creates; in
difference absorbs. And when the Supreme
Indifference has absorbed all of Pain sorrow
will be no more, and when sorrow is gone
the universe will disappear.

The worst ill that can befall me is more
easily realized by the imagination and is
known by the intellect to be more probable
than the greatest good fortune. The worst
is always probable; the best is often not
even possible. So in mentioning some great
potential misfortune we always preface it

182 THE TRAIL OF THE WORM

with the fear -begotten prayer, "which God
forbid." But the smile of incredulity is
never very far from our dreams of felicity.
The Eternal has packed its mighty secrets
in our pains, and if our cosmic memories
were as profound as our cosmic experiences
we would never hope. Our roots are be
neath us, but the flower — the mind — is born
anew in each life and dies with that life.
The elder dreams revisit us at certain un
expected moments in our lives, and it is
then, in a single moment, we nail truth, and
see the unimaginable woe in things, the uni
versality of anguish, the giant, writhing
spectres of the things we have been. Pluck
from that moment its gift of wisdom, or
forever live the dupe of the Impossible I

For what is this lapse between two eter
nities we call life? Life is a myth and a
mirage. The past never existed. We have
clothed a few mean facts in a tawdry rem
iniscent fancy. Our memories of childhood
are not the same as the childhood we re
member. Our youth is a sunken, lost At
lantis; but when we lived that youth it was
commonplace — oh, so commonplace! The
future is a mirage woven of dreams. What-
might-have-been is the mother of fantasy.

THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 183

Or, life is a series of endlessly recurring
dreams. That dream which recurs oftenest
we style mathematical truth ; the dream that
comes but once in a thousand years we call
a miracle.

What have we of light? The more light
there is in the world the blacker grows the
encircling gloom. Increase of light does
not mean decrease of darkness. You cannot
clip anything from the Infinite. If knowl
edge is infinite the recesses from which it
is quarried are infinite. The stalactylic
thought-formations grow more and more
brilliant as we move farther and farther
into the caves of consciousness; but it is be
cause the darkness is profounder, not be
cause the crystals are brighter.

And the lip-wisdom of science! The "uni
formity of Nature" is merely the uniformity
of a belief. A thing observed by all peo
ples, at all times, under all circumstances
is still rooted in credence, and not in cer
tainty, and possesses no greater claim to be
the truth than one thing observed by one
man, at a single moment, under a single set
of circumstances. Truth — if Truth there
be — does not lie in multiplicity, but in
vividness of insight. That the sun will rise

184 THE TRAIL OF THE WORM

and set tomorrow is not so certain in my
mind as that the process of its rising and
setting is inane, inutile. What I know of a
process is of less importance to me than
what I see in that process.

We know nothing of Law. We hear its
reverberations as it thunders through the
soul or catch its shadow on our retina as
it weaves the dawn or evanesces in the mys
tery of death; but the thing itself cannot
be laid hold of. Experience is hearsay,
seeming. It is the same with thought. As
in the physical world no two bodies can
ever touch, so in the soul world no being
ever touches his thought. Between him
and his highest thought there is a chasm
which even his imagination cannot bridge.
It is girdled by a sacred fire that holds him
at bay. Into its centre man can never
penetrate. We but lie in its shadow. And
man himself is but one of the infinite num
ber of shadows cast by the syncopated
breathing of the Shadow-Maker, the myth-
weaver, who reigns excarnate in Eternity,
who is everlastingly and who everlastingly Is.

Stability eludes the net of thought. We
seek stability in change, and when it comes
as Death we flee from it in terror.

THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 185

Time baffles like a dream. Time is but
the slime left by the slugworm of Circum
stance as it crawls lazily over the white
eternities.

Our acts ridicule our thoughts. The last
sin to die will be Pride because it is the
first and greatest virtue. Everything that
is born with an ego has pride; those who
affirm life do it through pride; those who
seek death do it through a greater pride;
those who battle do it through pride; those
who renounce in sackcloth and ashes are
ill of great pride. All is pride and a
vanity and a mockery. And the first virtue
was the first sin. Distinctions are circum
stantial. Behind all masks of time and
place there is the grimace of Mephisto.

Say aloud but once, "I am happy!" —
whisper it to the air, whisper it into the
night, murmur it to thy pillow, and already
the navvies have razed the edifice, the fiends
are at their sculduggery. Happiness and
consciousness are at war. The lids always
lie closed over the eyes of Happiness; her
lashes are fine needles; you cannot rape her
sight with impunity.

Ideas — Plato's verities — are at last as
dust. Ideas grow senile and slumber and

186 THE TRAIL OF THE WORM

die and lie in their graves for long ages and
come again in the garb of youth and
slaughter and slay and liberate; and this
death and resurrection go on throughout
all time. In Time there is nothing new;
and Eternity is neither new nor old.

Who shall sleep and dream not? In what
a place are the Ideas housed! What a slum's
lodging-house is the brain of man! What
strange, ragged, unshorn thoughts take up
their home there in the night, and slink
away in the morn, maybe never to return;
what loathsome-visaged impulses take up
their bed and board there! And sometimes
there come wan, pale wayfarers who seem
to bear about them the griefs of ageless days
and who flit away as they came — like ghosts
in the dawnlight.

Ideas reflect only the temporal order —
that grim and grimy rent in Eternity.

For we are the ligatures of a Relation.
When dream and deed are one then self-
consciousness will disappear. When emo
tion, intellect and act are knit into such a
unity that the joints and seams have dis
appeared, then comes the Man-God — then
will the Ideal be made real and the Real
be the Ideal.

THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 187

Vain dream! It is the war of wills that
breeds limitation, and so long as there
is limitation there is Pain, and pain — the
severance of dream from deed — brings us
back to self -consciousness.

The waters are lifted to the moon, but
will never reach the moon — so our dreams
tend to deeds, but they ever remain dreams.

COSMIC MARIONETTES

AL the great novelists are fatalists.
Admission or denial on their part
is beside the question. The man
who believes in free will is a fatalist. He
is temperamentally what he is. Fate is
mental squint; it is the angle of vision, a
viewpoint, physical compulsion.

Balzac called himself the "Secretary of
Society," and his books are but an inven
tory of its forces. These forces he incar
nated and called human beings. He thought
the human soul could be identified with
electricity, and conferred on it about as
much free will as he would have accorded
any other kind of battery. From his Jovian
heights he surveyed the movements of these
galvanized figures; recorded their attrac
tions and repulsions ; pulled them apart and
showed us their insides; and made you feel
when he had finished his task that his brain
was the House of Life, and we the wonder
children of his creation. His men and
(188)

COSMIC MARIONETTES 189

women drift hither and thither on the
soundless sea of Being, while the viewless
gods of the deep are the masters of the
currents.

Thackeray is always taking you aside
and explaining the way he does the trick.
He brings each of his characters into life
with a drag on him — the drag of having
to be himself. All of Thackeray's creations
carry this air of compulsion with them.
They are hand-me-down human beings,
and wear the look of long ill-usage. In
the nature of things Beatrix Esmond must
become the Baroness Bernstein. She seems
to expect some such destiny, and accepts
it with delicious sang-froid. Foker is — just
Foker ; he eoudn't possibly be anybody else,
and Dobbin we know has been Dobbin
from all eternity. Thackeray's belief in
an overruling Destiny was so profound
that his gentle soul, half -frightened at his
conclusions, was always casting around for
ways and means to let the old Gorgon
down easily.

Turgenev's characters are gripped in a
vise. They go through life like somnam
bulists. Bazaroff is an arsenal of tenden
cies. Liza is a mediaeval nun that by some

190 COSMIC MARIONETTES

curious freak has been revamped for nine
teenth-century consumption. Her soul,
shocked by the secular and buffeted by the
trivial, sought again the cloistral glooms
of the nunnery.

Hardy's and Meredith's characters are
of a piece. The searing breath of life blows
with equal force in their pages. Spiritual
resistance is fate working from the other
side. Chloe was blasted from within; Tess
was blasted from without.

Zola's fatalism is more pronounced than
any of these masters of fiction. This is
because of the stress he lays on heredity
and environment. His mission was to
assort our souls and pigeonhole them. He
was, indeed, the Claude Bernard of imag
inative literature. Blood, nerve, cell — there
you are. Pick out good forebears, for you
are the wraith of a dead man. You are
integrated matter in the process of redis
tribution. The history of your atoms is
the history of your soul. You "elect" to
lead a drab life; but your resolution counts
for nothing; some day it shall melt like
wax in the fires of sudden desire. The
future is an ogre; it is the past that slays.

Zola's miscroscopic eye, his piercing

COSMIC MARIONETTES 191

glances into the subsoil of life, are nowhere
better exemplified than in his masterwork,
"L'Assommoir." It is a fine study of the
subtle laws that damn. The connection be
tween an injured foot and a drunkard's
death — where is it? That's the art of it.
Moral logic there is none; but there is an
intellectual logic. The links in the chain of
causation — the connection between Cou-
peau's physical and mental fall — were
forged by a cunning Fate.

Our lives are steeped in these subtleties.
Each moment is big with ante-natal pur
pose. Our characters are pieced together
by trifles that escape observation, and the
way of our degradation is fixed.

Focus the mind for one moment on this
world of the great novelists. What a piece
meal pageant! What a carnival of marion
ettes! What cosmic mummery! Tentative
men and women; alleged lives; souls barely
basted to a body ; suggestions ; thin pipings ;
the unevolved elemental; stumps and ends
and shreds and butts of beings.

Here in this bogus earth-world, in this
slimy Malebolge, everything is planned;
nothing is completed. These children,
tethered to the Iron Ring of Necessity, eat

192 COSMIC MARIONETTES

the cake of hope; the brown bread of the
tangible is thrown into the street. We are
starving today, but it will always rain
manna tomorrow!

Are these creations aught but somnam
bulists who walk in the brains of their crea
tors? — and are we of flesh and blood aught
but somnabulists who walk in the dream-
cells of a hidden god? These master-dream
ers, these wraith-workers — will they wake
at the cock-crow of Eternity? Nay, they
are bubble-blowers as we are bubble-blown;
they are not voices, they are voiced; and
Charles Bovary was as "real" as Napoleon
Bonaparte.

These men who sketch life are used. They
submit their souls to the spirit, and their
characters move in the grooves of inexor
able law. No man knows what he does;
no great novelist ever knew what he was
writing. His fingers clutch the pen, but
the writing is mere copying; the original
is in the nature of things. His brain is
nothing more than a phonograph ; he is a
notary of the spirit, a transcriber of the
Law, a scrivener of the gods, an assorter
of junk.

Destiny works through the intellect, and

COSMIC MARIONETTES 193

the seers of life are subalterns. They sail
under sealed orders. They live with the
Great Gamer ado, but not on equal terms.
He is hidden — behind a pebble, it may be.
You may kick it, but He smiles — for He is
the kick.

The author of "Madame Bovary" was
Madame Bovary. Flaubert was her secre
tary.

THE DRAMA OF DAYS

A DAY! From the first opalescent
slur on the horizon to the last fire-
flecked cloud that hangs on the
last sunray, shot up from the abysm into
which the sun has fallen, on through the
span of ebon we call the night till the
moment when that opalescent slur again
slinks over the horizon — what things are
spun for us in that time!

Time is a coxcomb, and the days are his
many vestments. Days are, again, the
calendar of Chance, the dial of our sorrows
and revolts and joys.

In youth each day is a golden scabbard
from which we drag a glittering sword to
conquer some imaginative domain. In age
each day is but another fold in a winding-
sheet that muffles a gray, out-running uni
verse.

In that subtle ebb of the spirit which

we call memory there stand out gauntly, like

shoals that rise from the ocean after its

flood, days that were memorable in their

(194)

THE DRAMA OF DAYS 195

events, days with the shine and shimmer of
some triumph on their brows or with the
bitter record of some reprisal of Chance
branded on their cheeks. Then it is that
imagination, in that look backwards, per
sonifies the days, giving to arbitrary divis
ions of time this or that quality, breathing
bitter breaths into their thence corporate
selves, conferring on that little congerie of
minutes and seconds the qualities of malig
nity or buoyancy, placing in their hands a
wand or a knout — giving thus to pleasure
and pain a place on the calendar.

The spume of imagination covers the past,
and we carve in that passion of retrospec
tive self-conservation these little salient
time-pegs whereon to hang the rags and
tatters of memory. Wonder-children that
we are, the eternal revenants of the indis
soluble Spectre, it is thus we breathe the
breath of life into our old selves and mul
tiply our ghosts and replenish our empty
mental wardrobes.

On such a day — now that the years have
pelted us we see it — Destiny came to us
spying from it$ lurk-hole in a trifle. We
have come to know that little things decide ;
big things are only decisive.

196 THE DRAMA OF DAYS

Each second has a sliding panel over its
surface; behind it, in its lair, sprawls the
Sphinx, scrawling in the slime of circum
stance our future days.

That day we laughed and we were
doomed on that very day; this day we
groaned and we were elected to joy. We
know not what we do — we only know what
we have done.

Time is a moth that settles and nibbles
where the dust has gathered. There are
monstrous gaps in our days. We are lucky
if ten days in each year are saved to our
memory. That grave-like taciturnity be
tween remembered days! To memory and
identity it is just as though one had not
been. And sometimes from the depths of
the Unconscious, from that unfathomable
sea whereto we are finally ushered,
there will start up, like the re-evocation of
lost islands, a day long forgotten, with still
its shroud about it and the unerased tints
and hues of death still on its body. The
time-sea tosses up many a strange pebble
on these naked coasts of abandoned days.

It is hard to segregate a day in memory.
The emotions and dreams — knowing
nothing of the mechanical inventions that

THE DRAMA OF DAYS 197

man has fabricated to keep himself posted
on the progress he is making toward the
tomb — are fluid, blend and link themselves
by finer bonds than calendared tallies.

All our past-remembered life makes a
series of lakes in the mind, or, rather, pools
wherein, with head reverted, we see only
mirrored epochs in our wayfaring. The day
we lay on the grass, and looking up at the
heavens, suddenly guessed, by a quick
amalgamation in consciousness, the illusive-
ness of all creation, the impossibility of ever
finding the relation of the finite Me to the
infinite It — this does not seem to have
happened on a day — really, it was only a
minute in that day — but, related to our
future spiritual existence, it happened in
a cycle set apart for us by our destiny. The
rough clutch of Memory dragging that im
memorial minute higher and higher above
the seas of mnemonic oblivion as the years
go by has inflated and transfigured that
minute in that May or June day to gigan-
tesque proportions.

For the ego marks off its history on sun
dials and moon-dials that begin at the Greek
Kalends.

And yet we hold to dates and days. They

198 THE DRAMA OF DAYS

are the timepieces of intelligence, and we
use them till the dust of death clogs the
works. It is the ineradicable instinct for
the tangible that sends us back over our
tracks seeking the specific day for this or
that adventure or revelation. Our feet are
moored to the concrete however much our
heads bob in the timeless ether.

ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL
LAW

A~JL life is absorption — a sucking up,
a blending of forces. Absorption
and dissipation are the laws that
govern all the processes of the organic and
the inorganic worlds. I say absorption and
dissipation, but, properly there is nothing
but absorption. Dissipation is but absorp
tion seen from the other side.

The sun dissipates heat and light, but
the earth consumes both. Moving bodies
pulse their vibrations into the atmosphere,
and the atmosphere is lost in ether. The
seed drops to the earth and is lost in the
soil; the oak comes forth and in time passes
into decay, and is soil again, and seed again,
and oak again. In the gaseous flames of
the nebular orb a universe of force is ab
sorbed, and from the flaming retort of fire
it is belched forth into infinite space
in forms new and strange, to be absorbed
again by withered worlds and passion-spent
spheres.

(199)

200 ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW

A mighty and consuming thirst pervades
things. Naked forces skirt the topmost
heavens and the nether depths of the seas,
seeking to be clothed, hooded, wrapped,
shod, absorbed in matter. Who are the
dead but those who have absorbed life, who
in coffined silence await new unions in
mystic spheres? Who are the quick but
those who have come to this plane to absorb
planetary life and its myriad pulsing
streams of sentiency? Indeed, are the live
aught but the peelings and tailings of an
cestral existences — pale, wan relics of the
dead, vibrant wraiths, trailing after them
the forces and tendencies of their ancient
lives ?

The living breathe and move and have
their being because they have absorbed
their dead past selves, because they have
passed through unimaginable modes of life
and sucked into their souls the breath of
the past. They stand before us mere
echoes, sounding-boards on which a note or
two of the Great Diapason is registered.
As a sponge sucks up water, so do we suck
up life. Our eyes suck in the colors and
forms of the material world; our ears suck
in sounds, our palates suck in tastes, our

ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 201

nostrils suck in odors. These sense-ducts
flow to the brain, carrying their flotsam and
jetsam of impressions, and in that won
drous and ever-mysterious alembic the raw
materials which the senses furnish are ab
sorbed, minced, blended, and from the magic
cells flow those complex ideas that give us
"The Eve of Saint Agnes," or "Mona
Lisa."

What is that vast dream that underlies
the somnambulism of the ages? What is
that Idea which coheres through incoherency
and stands forever calm through cosmic
clash? What is it for which the seer has
pined, the saint has prayed, and the de
votee has wrought? Absorption — reabsorp-
tion in the One. Names differ; tendencies
do not change. And whether we be Bud
dhists and accept the idea of the non-per
sonal Divine Intelligence that is the sub
stratum of the phenomenal world, where
phantoms squeak and gibber and call it
life; or we believe in the One of Pythagoras
and Plato, or we accept the Christian meta
phor of the Father; or we yearn for the
Pure Being, or Non-Being, of Hegelianism,
or crave for immersion in the Oversoul of
Transcendentalism — whether it be any one

202 ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW

of these, it is reabsorption we are conscious
ly or unconsciously seeking. It is this in
tuition that is the basic concept of all reli
gions and religio-philosophic systems.

"Absorption in God" is the primary in
stinct of the religious soul and the last hope
of man. The temporal order is built of ex
pediency; its construction has been piece
meal; its forms are transitory. It is a mere
stop -gap between Eternity and Eternity.
It is a buffer state. Built in time, grounded
in the shifting sands of Change and Cir
cumstance, it is destined to die with the
planet.

It is the widest generalizations we crave.
Science does not crawl from point to point;
it circles from generalization to generaliza
tion. Each ending is but a beginning, and
each outermost an interior. The horizon
broadens with our ascension. Line merges
into line, circle into circle, cycle into cycle,
and still the press is ever forward. We
believe we are absorbing, while in reality
we are being absorbed. We believe we
are discovering, while in truth we are being
discovered. With each new obstacle sur
mounted, the under, hidden private Self
circles into broader life. We pierce the

ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 203

chrysalis of our last limitation and believe
that in sloughing it off we are discarding
it. But the Great Thaumaturgist never
discards anything. The new is the old re
vamped. The skin we slough off drops
silently into the Unconscious, where it is
remoulded nearer to the heart's more
urgent desire. It emerges transfigured as
our present self. The mind, like the heart,
has its systole and diastole. We escape into
higher forms of life by daily dying unto
ourselves.

In society — that vast and complex net
work of organized, objectified Will^— this
all-powerful law of absorption is seen at
work pursuing as relentlessly and as in
exorably its obscure end as in the purely
physical or psychic world. The individual
is cancelled in the family, the family ab
sorbed in the tribe, the tribe obliterated in
the nation.

The social unit cannot escape the fate
that awaits it. As surely as the needle
turns toward the pole does part overlap
part and the segmental become indistin
guishable in the whole. This law that passes
up through the circles of social change is
today apparent in the commercial world.

204 ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW

We hear much in denunciation of the trusts,
those giant combinations of capital that
absorb the small dealer and dangerous com
petitor, not by main force, but by a pro
cess as legitimate and as inexorable as the
drop of rain is absorbed into the sea or the
dew in the atmosphere. The trust is our
widest commercial generalization — the in
stinct of the sublime manifesting itself in
the world of give-and-take. As the great
nations of the earth assimilate the smaller
ones, and they, in turn, assimilate the tribes
within their borders, so the great purveyors
of the necessaries of life are drawing into
their hands the means of production and
the machinery of distribution of the whole
commercial world.

The logical question now that forces it
self on the mind is : Why not let the nation
instead of the individual do this? Why not
make the nation a trust and the people the
trustees? Why not absorb these giant cor
porations into the fabric of the State, and
put the stamp of approval on a law that
will have its way, willy-nilly? This is the
dream and the jargon of socialism. It is
founded on the incontrovertible proposition
that all things tend toward a common

ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 205

centre, no matter how great may appear
to be their surface diversity and differen
tiation from a common standard. It is this
that makes socialism right. It is founded
on the law of absorption, my euphemism
for murder.

No one thing can long remain wholly in
dependent. A human being may rise to
indefinite heights on the rungs of his en
vironment; but in these altitudes the air is
difficult to breathe. Gravitation tugs. Man
channels his own descents. A remorseless
Nemesis pursues those who rise above the
common level. The ligature which binds
man to man in works and days cannot be
dissolved with impunity. There are mo
ments in life when the individual may, like
Ibsen's Master Builder, achieve for a mo
ment absolute Selfhood, but his fate is
written on the scroll of natural law, and
from his dizzy height he will be dashed to
atoms. The ideal of absolute individualism
aims, consciously or unconsciously, at
achieving this quixotic independence. At the
basis of individualism lies the competitive
system. Man competes against man, and
achieves power and place — or poverty and
death.

206 ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW

And thus are all things woven of one
thread. Who shall trace the curvetings of
Law? Circle on circle towers above our
heads in rhythmic windings. Whorl upon
whorl rises above us, and its mystic spirality
is lost in the Unapparent.

Our souls are engulfed for an aeon or
two but to reappear on the curved surface
of consciousness. Like vigorous swimmers
who plunge beneath the watery avalanche
only to rise sound and whole on th^ placid
surface beyond the breakers, so do we sport
in the eternal forces. As an eagle circles
round and round over unknown seas, so
we rise higher and higher on the crest of
the laws that have ferried us hither and that
shall ferry us beyond. Microcosm melts
into macrocosm; the less flows molten into
the greater ; the trivial dissolves in the signi
ficant, and through all the Will is pro
mulgated.

In spouting mud and elemental mist — the
Dream of Absorption was there; in pale
ozoic slime — the Dream was there; in the
boundless underworld of instinct and blind
procreation — the Dream was there. Belt
and buckle and chain have burst and fallen
into the past; belt and buckle and chain

ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 207

are forged — and the Dream persists. When
the earth shall be hooded in flame and its
poles capped and shod in vapor — the Dream
will be there.

Plunging from birth to rebirth, the soul
of Man gnaws and files at his gyves. Limi
tation he recognizes as his one enemy.
Through storm and bloom and the press
of circumstance he seeks to clasp the Ultra-
Generalization. Systems and codes he
sloughs off like snake-skin. Time and space
wilt in the breath of his Desire. He labors
to force the Northwest Passage to the Polar
Seas of Quiescence. He ponders on his
latest, newest route to the Indies of Pas
sivity.

Absorption is God's method — God, who
is the last, the final Equilibration, the Spent
Dynamic, the Eternal Static.

ACATALEPSY

THE doctrine of the Acataleptics was
the doctrine of the incomprehensibil
ity of things. Pyrrho is the supreme
acataleptic among the ancients. Anatole
France is the supreme acataleptic among the
moderns. All opinion is heretical. To say "I
know" is to put the stamp of ignorance on
one's self. If catalepsy is a possession,
acatalepsy is the state of ultimate freedom.
It is a condition of transcendental ignor
ance. The brain of the acataleptic is an Eye
that through an eternity of time focuses its
vision in an infinite number of directions.
The world is a whimsy. Nothing can be
proven, nothing can be disproven.
"Eureka!" was uttered by a madman.

Acatalepsy is the ecstasy of indifference.
It is the Nirvana of knowledge. Pyrrho
lived in a world without longitude or lati
tude. The "I think, therefore I am" of
Descartes would have been written, "I
think, therefore I only think I am" by
(208)

ACATALEPSY 209

Pyrrho. At the touch of this Prospero of
negations the dogmas of the world crumble
to dust and the dear truths we have nuzzled
on our bosoms turn to fantastic mockeries.

Flux and reflux, eternal transition —
what do we know? Belief of any kind is a
species of hypnosis. Certainty is the super
stition of the senses. Time is an illusion.
Eternity is a word. Each thing is only a
mask for some other thing. Names are the
placards we put on incomprehensible ob
jects. Nature winks at us slyly. There is
a Rabelaisian hilarity on the face of the
external universe, as if it would say,
"Presto! Behold me! Behold me not! Hold
tightly to your possessions, man; whatever
is is not. That is my supreme jest."

This monster of gullibility, man, believes
in what he sees and touches — that it is just
that thing, and nothing else! He arranges
his beliefs just as he arranges his clothes
in his wardrobe. His world is as definite
as a map for a townsite. His God could be
stowed away in a bandbox.

The eternal Sancho Panza on his ass of
Certitude! He munches his brown bread
and cheese in the Garden of Hesperus. He
picnics in the empyrean. He shambles over

210 ACATALEPSY

the stars. He is the vulgar Knower. He
moves in an incomprehensible Mystery.
But he never suspects. His universe is
solid and substantial. His brain is a yard
stick. In the great hurricane of atoms he
cautiously raises a parasol called a creed.
"It is ten o'clock," "It is noon," he says.
How does he know? It is forever the Hour
of the Eternal.

The sceptic is a bankrupt who through
all eternity cannot rehabilitate himself. In
No-Man's-Land he is a Sultan. The nets
woven by the system-makers will never
strangle him in their folds. Through the
walls of all the granite superstitions,
whether they are scientific, political or reli
gious, he passes like a ghost. He is the mys
tic of realism.

If Shakespeare created a world, Mon
taigne destroyed a sidereal system. Only
the absurd is true. The senses lie, the brain
lies, consciousness lies. How do we know
they lie? Because another lie says so.

The acataleptic glance melts the light
of the stars and puts out the sun. Acata-
lepsis! In the retorts of its brain it melts
cosmologies and gods. It puts its finger
on Death and says, "Not proven." It puts

ACATALEPSY 211

its ear to the heart of Life thundering in
its Gargantuan hulk of matter and says,
"Thou art only a seeming."

Crescent and Cross, Scarabee and Dra
gon fuse and evaporate in the mighty men
struum of this alchemic ironist. One folly
is pitted against another folly, one mon
strous illusion rises to confront another
monstrous illusion. The iron gates of God
are papier mache. ^Plato's Eternal Ideas
are plaster par is. Brahma is painted fog.
The celestial seraglios of Mohammedanism
are sacrosanct pigsties. The Christian
"Mansion in the Skies" is in cinders. The
Kingdom of God is a fading mirage that
even the dying are no longer able to con
jure up. The Jehovah of the Jews is a Big
Wind. The First Cause of theology is a
spite-wall. The Ego of the Romantics is a
huge dummy swollen taut with flatulent
German metaphysics. Anarchism, Socialism,
Protestantism, Agnosticism, Manicheism,
Buddhism are the tabulation, consolidation
and fulmination of mental and tempera
mental disorders. They are the passing in
carnations of the Incomprehensible, the
scoffing incantations of the immortal Maya ;
the radiant revelations of the Immanent
Yawn.

212 ACATALEPSY

In the omnipotent orgy of ideas the acata-
leptic preserves an indulgent passivity.
While the battle rages he polishes a spy
glass. He belongs to no army. He is not
interested in the outcome. Only the spec
tacle enchants. His brain is ascetic; his eye
is gluttonous. Over the earth go the
armies — over the earth and into the earth.
He is at Troy, at Waterloo, at Gettysburg,
at Verdun — there is always a Bloody Angle
in the combat of concepts where the fray
is the most picturesque. It is all the horse
play of ants on a star. Aristotle and Plato,
Spinoza and Hobbes, Leibnitz and Scho
penhauer, Pascal and Nietzsche — these are
merely the gigantic oscillations of one pen
dulum.

Doctrines flow from the agy ill of per
sonality. To be, to think, to know was the
primordial heresy.

This little man, this little man, who comes
a-whining into the world to solve the riddle
of Being! This self -constituted aide-de-camp
to the Infinite ! This sculpted piece of proto
plasm who with arms akimbo buzzes his
prejudices into the ears of the Sphinx!
This choreboy of a blind Will who believes
he is moulding stars!

ACATALEPSY 213

Mahomet went to heaven on a white mule,
another rode into Jerusalem on an ass, and
still another who had Aladdinized the world
rode to death on Rosinante. All symbols!

Ah! If the sceptics dared laugh to their
fill! The stars would founder in space at
the uproar and atoms and potencies still
unborn would age in their nothingness.

The petrified smile on the face of the
ironic Nihilist is a smile that is a weapon.
All the bobbing hobby-horses on the merry-
go-round of religion and philosophy come
to a standstill and their riders sit motion
less when the Unbeliever is seen standing
at the door. He is the grand dissociator
of ideas, the surgeon of illusions, a snow
that blankets all growing things.

Your dreams? — he skins them alive. Your
God? — he splits it into an infinite number
of particles and hands you back a hatful
of waste. He is a magician. He can
transform matter into force and force into
matter, and both into the incomprehensible.
He makes a witches' broth out of all the
materials of human thought and brews from
them — nothing, except it be his petrified
smile or the glint of malice in his eye.

The idol-makers fabricate through the

214 ACATALEPSY

aeons. There are plaster-cast images and
images in bronze and images built of ebon
and adamant. But an end is made to all
of them with the bare bodkin of incredulity.

"What do I know?" asks Montaigne.

"Just that," answers Pyrrho from his
tomb.

CODA

THE Jews gave us Jehovah, a fan
tastic old man of thunders and
scourges, as testy as King Lear and
as childish. The Mohammedans gave us
Allah, who punishes with fire and rewards
with flesh; an ironic, hot-blooded, Fal-
staffian God who acts as a "bouncer" in a
celestial seraglio. Christianity gave us the
symbol of Calvary with its pale God nailed
between two thieves — which conveys this
truth: Law and order come first; mendi
cant gods and thieves, take notice !

Olympus was an aristocracy. Sublime,
cruel, satanic, merciful — these supermen
and superwomen of the Greek imagination
were based in life itself. They were the
personifications of real aspirations and pas
sions. They were bubbles blown from pipes
of clay by beings who loved the world, the
flesh and the beautiful. And so no matter
how far these bubbles went into the empy
rean they still pictured the earth, its forti-
(215)

216 CODA

fying hells and its redemptive pains and the
sex-aura — worn not as a shroud as in the
Christ-myth, but as a garment of glory.
Olympus was a place of quality, the Ver
sailles of the imagination; not a Vatican of
diseases or a mausoleum of canonized
corpses or apotheosized renunciants of ques
tionable manhood.

Olympus was beautiful. There was there
no stench of skulls, no reek from the unaired
beds of Allah's houris, no insipid, simpering
asexual angels whose whole eternity was
spent in telling God the time. There were
air and light on Olympus. A cosmology
was here raised to the dignity of a sport.
Whichever way you turned you faced the
Beautiful. Whatever door you tapped
opened on the Infinite. Every step on
those heights was like a magical levitation.

Mysterious, suggestive, equivocal, in pas
sing through the great Greek myth the
imagination throws out its flaming colored
shafts from its zenith to its nadir. Every
thing is fecund on those heights. Death
is the one inconceivable thing. Homer and
Aeschylus and Plato and Sophocles have
been there before you. No matter. In that
world every poet is a pioneer. The eyes

CODA 217

of those gods never say the same thing
twice because their brains never focus twice
in the same direction.

Those giant mosaics of a spent race ! How
many millions collaborated in the evolu
tion of those dreams? What mind put the
first tint of that stupendous vision on the
dead palette of Reality? Who was that
Rembrandt with the drop of transfiguring
color in his brain? Who was that Phidias
who chiselled with his brittle dream the
brow of Apollo? Who was that Michael
Angelo who charted in imaginative ecstasy
that ether-capped Olympus that was to
eject from its mysterious ovum gods and
goddesses as long-lived as the star which
fostered them?

Against that monstrous background of
the Unknown that man in all ages gashes
with the lightning of his thought Olympus
stands out unalterable in time, a master-
work of alto-relievo whose sculpted figures
are posed for eternity. The tears of Christ,
flowing for two thousand years from the
unknown heavens whereto he ascended,
have not washed away that breedy world
of antique thought.

Christ lives. Aphrodite reigns!

218 CODA

The Gods of Greece were not an
ambulance corps. Olympus was not a dis
pensary. To be carried into the presence
of Zeus on a stretcher was no aid to im
mortality. Paganism did not seek to amend
nature or cleanse God. It personified the
real. Facing life with every sense agape,
it uttered a lyrical amen. Bounding from
the heart of the ageless Mother, it uttered
a hosannah to the Sun.

Paganism was dynamic. It took the part
of the eternally pulsating atom against the
frosty glamour of Nirvana. It struck to
gether the cymbals of victory over the grave.
It would have held Dyonisiac revels on
Golgotha, and on him who was pinioned to
the wooden Caucasus on that mount it
would have bound eglantine and over the
crown of thorns it would have strewn rose-
leaves. It threw dice with Destiny, know
ing that Destiny is a blackleg. To lose or
win — there is no difference. To have lived
and to have played the game — that is the
glory. Power and Beauty, Ecstasy and
Frenzy, a riant diabolism, the sense of a
weltering joy — that was the Pagan meta-
physic.

Man is a dike between Time and Eter-

CODA 219

nity, and he gleams with the waters of both.
He is the corybantic apparition. His life
is a delirium. He is a crackbrained God.
His seventy years are an orgy of feeling
and thought. This shatterpated upstart
makes a superb gesture even before the
gates of hell. The life of the dullest of
beings is still epical. Genius is a dementia.
The winged hounds of Desire have sunk
their fangs into our souls and we have
rabies.

Thus do I see the soul of Greece, and the
gods that pontificated on Olympus are the
multi-incarnation of that soul.

Front this lusty dream of man with the
plush dreams of the theological dandies and
the nanny-goats of morality of today. The
lightnings that are locked in my veins, the
passions pent and tombed in my nethers
are sins!

Power lies abed and sucks the nipple of
a milkless breast. Beauty petitions at the
gate of Mammon. The envenomed Christ-
blood still flows from those immedicable
wounds that know no healing. And we
who once beheld Aphrodite shake the sea
from her tresses and once were chum to
satyr and faun and in another time dogged

220 CODA

the footsteps of Diana, we are rammed into
a manger and cuffed into a charnelhouse
and puddle in the sweat of fear.

From that transstellar Olympus we are
come to a carpenter's table. From the
parley of the gods we are come to the
bickerings of Gargantuan eunuchs. We
who once wore the laurel wreath now wear
the mildewed helmet of salvation. The
beaker once filled with ambrosia is now a
monstrance from which one may quaff an
apocryphal Holy Ghost. Pegasus is be
come a Palm Sunday ass. Jason is a mis
sionary who decoys the heathen, and his
golden fleece comes from the fleeced. The
Bacchic amphora graven with mystical
festive rites has become a consecrated bowl
wherein Ignorance dips its dirty finger-tips.

Christianity has amputated Life at the
navel. It has watered the milk in the breast
of Aphrodite. It has thrown the cowl of
asceticism over Apollo. It has put a crown
of thorns on Pan.

But the snows on Olympus are melting,
and in the veins of Time are the seeds of
the old gods, who are incarnated again and
again on the earth. Religions are passing
epidemics, but Paganism is as immortal as

CODA 221

matter, as indestructible as sex, as eternally
legitimate as sensation.

Out of the purple seas of the Coming
Time again rises the divine Aphrodite be
fore my prophetic eyes, and at Her breast
she clasps Eros, who is the Christ reborn,
regenerated, paganized.

It is the Second Advent!

THE END.

TYPOGRAPHY AND PRINTING BY
THE ULLMAN PRESS, INC., N. Y.

14 DAY USE

RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED

LOAN OEPT.

This book is due on the last date stamped below, or

on the date to which renewed.
Renewed books are subject to immediate recall.

18Sep'57BC

RETURNED TO
^ATR=STAT. U&

NOV 1 1 1957

:' * V/

§ kl

>

: ;

0

.

& '*

EEC. CIR. MAR 1 2 1979

LD 21-100m-6,'56
(B9311slO)476

General Library

University of California

Berkeley